


things that gods despise

by dawl_and_dapple



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Awkward Flirting, Background Relationships, Magical Realism, Monsters, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, Pining, Rating May Change, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, inaccurate particle physics, plot heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 62,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28052367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawl_and_dapple/pseuds/dawl_and_dapple
Summary: Beau risked a glance over her shoulder as she ran. The thing was following her, tumbling over itself with unnatural angular movements, and was catching up.She didn’t need to wonder what would happen if the thing reached her; there was a bone-deep intuition letting her know that this thing was wrong, that it should not exist, and she should do anything in her power to avoid touching it. Perhaps a dumb animalistic instinct woken from where it had been sleeping between the coils of DNA by her sheer terror.Geneva, Switzerland. February 1989.Both Beau and Caleb are quite sure that they understand the way of the world, be it scientific or a tad more pessimistic. But when strange and unexplainable occurrences begin haunting them they are both forced to confront the new reality: that magic is seeping into their world from another, far more dangerous one.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast, Nott | Veth Brenatto & Caleb Widogast
Comments: 101
Kudos: 152





	1. men and nature reeled as if with wine

**Author's Note:**

> so here's what i remember from high school physics class,

When he woke up Caleb was immediately aware of three things: First, that he had fallen asleep on the keyboard of his computer and the keys had bitten uncomfortably into his left cheek. Second, there was an alarm whining from somewhere across the room behind one of the other computing units. Third, the woman who sat at the desk directly next to Caleb, who was of course no longer there at this time of night, had left one of her funny little clockwork toys behind. He knew this because he had flailed after being woken by the alarm, hit it squarely with his left elbow, and it was now performing an erratic and noisy dance somewhere on the ground by his feet.

Caleb rubbed his eyes and blinked. The room was only half-lit. Whatever was beeping for his attention was washing that corner of the office in a pulsing blue light that bled over the dozen or so desks and computer units between him and the front of the room. His left cheek hurt.

This was not the first time Caleb had fallen asleep at his desk, and far from the first that he had declined his co-workers’ offers to give him a lift back into town from the office, back to his tiny apartment flat. He was quite used to the sounds of sleeping computers, the low hum, and the peaceful quiet that came with the exodus of the other technicians and scientists.

But this time the night felt different. Caleb licked his lips and tasted static.

“Hallo?” There was no answer from the room; He was right in assuming he was the only one working so late.

Caleb bent down to pick up the little metal toy. It was well-crafted and made a final few aborted jerks in his hand as the mechanisms lost momentum. It looked like a sailor, or a pirate perhaps, and swung a tiny periscope in its tiny hand, although the detail to the automaton’s miniature clothing was simple and childish. Caleb tucked the toy into his backpack, thinking he would return the toy to the woman, whose name escaped him, first thing the next morning in case she wouldn’t return to the same room the following day, in case the toy was of high sentimental value. He’d barely spoken to her, but she had seemed friendly and sharp and hadn’t ever bothered Caleb while he was deep in work.

He stood and groaned when the muscles in his shoulders and back ached and cramped. Rubbing carefully at his neck, Caleb wandered over to the source of the beeping alarm and flashing light. He suspected somebody had left a monitor running, or otherwise a computer was simply misbehaving, as many of these awful new contraptions often liked to do.

The blue light was coming from between two banks of memory, the large black aisles bristling with wires and dials that oozed heat and numbers and were spaced only so far apart to allow a man to walk between them without burning his nose, approximately two feet from the ground. The issue with this observation was that the light was also located approximately two inches away from the wall of the closest bank.

Caleb stared at the floating blue glow, still rubbing at his neck. He blinked slowly.

“And what are you?”

The sound of the alarm was definitely coming from a device plugged into a memory bank to Caleb’s right. It was about the size of his hand and unfamiliar to him, made from polished black metal and smooth plastic, with a single green LED by its port to indicate that it was currently active. It had no lettering or logo to give Caleb a clue about its function or make.

Caleb looked back at the undulating glow. It was certainty strange; it resembled the sort of light that an alarm would emit, but it hovered in the air around the height of his knee like a blue-purple firefly. He carefully knelt down before it. As he reached out a finger towards the glow, he felt a troubling sensation come over him; his teeth ached suddenly, his eyes became unfocussed, the pain in his muscles strained by his poor sleeping position vanished in a vast wave of tingling numbness. He pulled his hand back.

“ _Gott_ …” He took a shaking breath. “I must be crazy.”

Caleb stood and turned to the source of the beeping. He thought for a moment before unplugging the device from the memory bank, and the beeping stopped at once.

He looked over his shoulder; the floating light had vanished. Calmly, Caleb placed the device on top of the memory bank and backed away from the aisle.

He slung his backpack over his shoulder and left the room and the computers behind. As he walked through the cold corridors and out of the building into the colder night air, he made a mental note to double check his medication dosage soon.

* * *

Beau was woken by an explosion. She jerked awake and stared into blackness as she listened to the sky erupt over her head. It lasted for ten seconds, then her cabin sunk back into silence.

She lit her bedside lamp and crept to the nearest window and pulled back the thick curtains and squinted out through the foggy glass, not knowing what to expect exactly, but expecting something.

What little light escaped the tiny fogged-up window dimly lit the snow laying evenly outside for fifty feet before being swallowed by pitch dark. She couldn’t see the sky, given that she was backlit and there wasn’t another source of light on the mountainside for at least three miles.

Beau grimaced and tugged the curtains shut behind her head, sheltering herself from the light of the electric lamp and pressing her nose up to the window’s cold glass, and frowned accusingly at the sky. And she waited.

Everything flashed brilliant white. For a split-second Beau could see everything outside her cabin as clear as in broad daylight; the small wooden porch and the two plastic plants pushed up against the bench by the front door; the trodden path through the snow that led to the little garage shed where her car was parked; the line of thick evergreens that marked the end of her tiny patch of land and the beginning of wilderness, the tall brutal shadow of the alps that stood impassively above everything else. Then the flash ended, and everything was dark again.

Beau held her breath and counted. One cauliflower. Two cauliflower. Exactly like her mom had taught her. Three cauliflower. Four c—

The sky erupted into noise again. It barely sounded like thunder. This sounded like ten thunderclaps happening all at once, booming overhead for far longer than what seemed possible before falling into a rattled silence.

Beau swore. She wished once again that her cabin had a landline. The locals would know what the fuck this was, and she was going to struggle to sleep not knowing the answer. But she’d have to wait until the next day. She swore again and pulled her face away from the window and staggered back into the safety and warm electric light of her bedroom.

She ran her hands through her hair and licked her lips. She tasted static.

* * *

Caleb rubbed his thumb over the rim of his mug. He had slept particularly poorly last night and now felt remarkably ill. The coffee supplied at his office, which was usually pretty foul on a good day, seemed momentarily to him to be more of a risk to his health than the radioactive sources five floors down.

He was waiting miserably in the lounge near the front of the building and had been for almost an hour. He was quite sure that the woman who sat next to him in the second LEP monitor room the previous day took her coffee in this lounge also; his memory was perfect. He was quite certain that she would be here, and he would be able to hand over the toy that she had misplaced.

He was also twitching uncontrollably and seeing blobs of colour floating in the corners of his vision, but that was beside the point.

Rather than sleep for any longer than ten minutes at a time last night Caleb had occupied himself with the mystery of the floating blue light. He had thought about fairy stories of spirits that took the form of floating lights which led people to their deaths in the woods. He had thought about ball lightning. He had thought about a number of more reasonable explanations, such as his own sleep deprivation, but had remained obsessed and afraid.

He was still thinking about the light when the door to the lounge opened and the woman who he was looking for charged in.

She was no taller than four feet, brown skinned and plump, late twenties, or early thirties, with a constant frantic energy to her. Her hair was in its usual thick twin brains. She spared one glance towards Caleb before she hurried straight to the counters opposite him, kicked a plastic stool that had been pushed out of the way back into place, hopped up, and began making her coffee.

Caleb stood and cleared his throat. “Uh, excuse me?”

“Uh huh?” The woman didn’t turn around. Her hands moved fast and with frightening precision. Caleb almost backed away from the intensity of her operation. She appeared to be filling in a paper form with one hand while measuring the coffee powder with another.

“I, um, I believe you left this last night. I didn’t want for you to lose it, so, ah, here you go, ma’am.”

The woman finally turned and looked right at Caleb. He made an effort not to flinch. Her gaze was strong, like her eyes were cut from raw black basalt. It took him a full second to remember to hold out the toy in question.

“This…uh, you left it on your desk.”

She stared at the toy. A smile broke across her face, making both her cheeks dimple. “Oh, that old thing.” She jumped down from the stool and crossed the room, eyes locked onto the toy. “Thank you. I probably would have totally forgotten where I put it once I realised it was gone. Thank you,” she repeated as she gingerly took the tiny automaton from Caleb. She held it like I t was made from spun sugar.

“It was no problem.” Caleb dimly observed that although he had impulsively chosen to speak to the woman in English, she had an unplaceable accent that played under her words. He would have called her some variety of British at first, but she seemed to drift across the Atlantic, and there was an entirely foreign tang to her voice that made him dizzy when he tried to place it. “I am sorry, I do not think I have ever caught your name. I am Caleb.”

“Veth,” the woman answered, still cradling the toy in her hands. “It’s nice to meet you Caleb.” She looked up from the doll and stared at him like he was an equation, tilting her head and narrowing her dark eyes. “How long have you worked here, Caleb?”

“Ah, about…” He rubbed his chin idly, and only then realised he had forgotten to shave in his stupor that morning. He pulled his hand away and tucked it into his trouser pocket. “Five years, two months, twenty days. Give or take.”

She looked impressed. “Wow.”

“And you?”

“Barely one year,” she said, tucking the toy away into a pocket of her overcoat. “This place still freaks me out sometimes.”

“The laboratory or the country?”

Veth grinned. “All of the above.” She went back over to her coffee and finished pouring it out into a mug identical to Caleb’s. “This stuff is foul,” she muttered.

Caleb returned to the lumpy couch he had sat on before and sipped his own foul stuff. He considered asking Veth about the strange light he had seen, before considering the likelihood of her immediately suspecting him of madness, given that he probably looked like a madman already. He scratched again at his prickly jaw and sighed into his mug.

The couch dipped a little as Veth joined him. She was humming an unfamiliar tune while shuffling the papers from before over the stained surface of the coffee table. Caleb glanced over at them. They didn’t look anything like the work he had been doing recently.

“What are you working on?” Caleb tried to ask as casually as possible.

“A pet project,” Veth said simply. “What about you?”

“Nursery tests for the LEP collider. I’m in charge of a team of eight, almost half of them in France at the moment, and we’ve been stuck waiting on some hardware to arrive from Germany for months. The work is slow and painful. What is your pet project?”

Veth’s shoulders tensed. “Oh, you know. Silly things. Why is half your team in France?”

“Two are on their honeymoon. One is French. What are the silly things? I would love to know.”

Veth’s eyes narrowed. She shrunk away from Caleb on the couch and tried to shield as much of the papers as she could with her small hands, which was not very much. “Why?”

“I am a scientist, just like you. It is my job to ask questions.”

She sucked in a deep breath of air and said shakily, “It’s…uh. It’s pretty complicated. I am searching for evidence of…a particle…an antiparticle. It’s, uh…it’s gonna be a big one, yep. Just you wait and see.”

Caleb stared at her. If she didn’t look so scared, he would have thought she was trying to make a joke at his expense. But she was simply a spectacularly bad liar. He almost laughed anyway.

“Don’t laugh at me!” she squeaked. “I’m being serious.”

Caleb twisted his lips into neutrality. “You’re not. You’re lying to me.”

“I am _not_ lying.”

“Veth.”

“Okay. I’m lying.” She flopped back onto the couch and crossed her arms. “And the project’s going nowhere fast anyway. I’m stuck. But I would appreciate it if you didn’t poke around my business, mister. This is _my_ pet project. And I work alone.”

It pained Caleb to abandon such a fascinating topic, but he did not wish to upset the woman. “ _Ja_ , okay, okay. Then, tell me what you work on when you’re not working on your little pet project.”

“I’m with the engineers.” She pointed a finger downwards through the floor of the lounge. “Busy putting together those big toys that you clever boys like to play with so much.”

Caleb smiled. “I appreciate it.”

“You better,” Veth muttered before she took a gulp of coffee, then grimaced at the taste. “I hate being underground. It’s almost as bad as underwater, if you ask me, but at least there’s air. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy down there, like I forget what sunlight looks like. I know it’s silly. But once I get back out at the end of the day it’s like…wow, the sky, I’ve missed you. Hah!”

“Have you been up the mountains yet?”

“Huh?”

“You should try it if you haven’t. Take one of the cable cars up the south of the city. Even just a hike if skiing is not, ah, not your thing. It can be nice. Refreshing. It is very quiet and beautiful, and the sky looks enormous.”

“Do you ski?”

“Sometimes. I prefer long and quiet walks.”

“Hm. I’ve never…skiid, is that how you say it? Skeed…skiyed…Whatever. It doesn’t snow much where I’m from. And there are no mountains nearby.”

Caleb laughed and set down his empty mug. “Then this must be truly bizarre for you, then, hah? So much snow. Surrounded by mountains. The tallest mountain in Europe practically visible from the windows of this building.”

“What about you?”

“Hm?”

“Where you’re from. Does it snow there often?” Veth’s eyes were flickering over a list of readings on one of her pet project papers. Her face remained half-turned towards Caleb as she listened.

“Every year. I come from a small town in the south of Germany, not far from the mountains, and it snows every winter.”

“Oh?”

“When I was a child it would snow until I could barely walk through it. We would have to dig paths, trenches really, through the snow so that I could get to the roads and get on my way to school. And then there would be storms.”

Caleb paused and rested his chin on his palm. There was a memory struggling to free itself from the great big tangle of time that rested in his head.

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “During those storms, I would walk from my parents’ house through the trees to the foot of the mountain and watch lighting touch the zenith, like the sky was splintering, like shattered glass, sometimes. I wanted desperately to know what lighting was, but my parents couldn’t answer me. Not fully anyway. They would simply answer “electricity”. But I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why it was happening, why I could see it before I heard it, what exactly happened in the skies above my home, all that invisible magic. It was part what got me interested in physics at first.”

Veth looked away from her papers. “That sounds beautiful.”

“I was a lonely child,” Caleb said into his hands, smiling at the floor. “I liked to get lost in the woods.”

“And you’ve always loved…physics, then?”

“Science. The way the world works. It’s beautiful, how everything fits together to create such a large and chaotic system, and how much we still have yet to learn about our universe. Don’t you think?”

“It freaks me out a little.”

“Me too, sometimes. You know, there are people out there in the world who think that the machines we play with here will destroy the world. They think we’ll push a big red button one day and tear a hole in reality. They watch too many science fiction movies. I am only afraid of people. People, people with big mouths and big pockets, are capable of more destruction than any supercollider.”

Veth was quiet for a moment. Caleb bit his tongue and wondered if he had said too much and become a little carried away; he rarely spoke to anybody but himself and the experience was often like opening a high-pressure valve.

Rather than look at Veth he turned his eye to the papers on the coffee table. She had leaned far enough away for him to get a good look at them now and the familiar patterns of numbers and symbols began to arrange themselves. Before he realised it, he was translating her work in his head. He was quick; he had never met anybody who computed as quickly and as accurately as himself.

Veth must have noticed his wandering attention because she scooted the papers further from him. But Caleb put his hand out.

“Ah. It’s—I’m sorry, but there’s a mistake.”

“Huh?”

“Your work.” He pointed at one of the slips under her hand. “There is an error there. I believe you have used the incorrect notation. That or I have misread your handwriting.”

Veth squinted at her papers. She chewed her lip and glanced between her work and Caleb, who knitted his fingers together uncomfortably on his lap.

“I am sorry for looking.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m glad you did. I didn’t notice this,” she said, pulling a pen from a pocket and scribbling a note next to the line of mathematics that Caleb had identified. “Do you recognise what I’m doing?”

“Sorry?”

“This equation.” She motioned to the dozen or so pieces of paper. “Do you know what this equation’s describing?”

“No. I only saw a little bit,” he admitted. “Just the top few lines of that one sheet.

“You could tell where I had made the mistake…just from that fragment?”

Caleb nodded. Veth blinked slowly at him. “You know what…” She crossed her arms over her chest and peered at Caleb. “I’ll take you up on your offer.”

“What offer?”

“Up the mountain. I’ll go on a hike with you, or whatever. I’ve been a bit of a coward about it so far. Snow, water, not my thing, but I’ll try anything once.”

“I didn’t offer to t—”

“This Saturday?” said Veth, gathering up her things and draining her coffee.

Caleb blinked. “Uh, ja. Okay.”

“Great.” The woman washed out her mug and slung her satchel over one shoulder, smiling toothily at Caleb. “I’ll find you later this week for details, but I’ve got to go now. Busy, busy, busy. See you then! Can’t wait.” And with that, Veth left the lounge and Caleb behind in stunned silence.

Caleb chewed his lip. He tried replaying the conversation in his head, tried pinpointing the moment when he might have unintentionally invited the woman to…befriend him. He had only wanted to know about her pet project; perhaps she had mistaken that passive curiosity for friendliness; perhaps he had been overcome by nostalgia after being asked about his childhood home and had forgotten to seem as uninteresting as humanly possible. But that was beside the point. The fact of the matter was that Caleb was now obligated to…hm, _socialise_ with this woman. He wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

* * *

“But it was crazy! It sounded like bombs going off over my head! And I looked outside, and I saw lightning and shit, but the thunder was like…fucked up. Sounded like bombs, I’m telling you.”

The poor boy Beau had cornered in the reception of the chalet stared up at her with wide blue eyes. He was probably still in his teens, French, spotty, and a head shorter than her. He nodded along to her vivid description. “Yes, that sounds normal, miss.”

“Hey,” she said, pointing a finger into his chest. “You call me Beau. Not miss, missus, madam, young lady, mademoiselle, just Beau.”

The boy nodded more vigorously. “Beau.”

“You said it’s normal?”

“Yes. When it’s a storm during snow. The storm and the snow…eh…” He moved his hands together in a complex motion, frowning, struggling to both explain something he did not fully understand himself and to translate the nonsense into English for Beau. “The snowflakes make the lightning…there is a complicated process. The noise is bigger. It lasts longer, the booming.”

“This happen a lot?”

He shook his head. His face had turned a ripe red colour in his panic. “Only high up the mountain, only in a thunderstorm, only when it is snowing. All at once. That, eh, that makes the noise.”

“Hmm.” Beau folded her arms. The boy took this as his sign to escape and skittered away through an unmarked door into the kitchen.

Of course, she understood it no better than before, but at the very least knew that she hadn’t been hallucinating nor witnessing Armageddon.

This was the sort of weather phenomena that she wouldn’t have ever seen back at home in her parents’ happy warm sunny flat corner of America. Of course, she had seen plenty of thunderstorms from her bedroom window through the years of her childhood. They would strike the hills and wake the dogs in the neighbourhood into panicked barking. Her mom had taught her how to measure the distance between herself and the strikes.

With a tight grimace Beau shook the thought out of her head; the memories made her nauseous as always.

She was alone in the chalet’s reception for the moment. A few other staff members pottered about cleaning up behind visitors, but the place was pretty quiet. Beau considered sneaking out to head home early, or even drive into the city for the evening and enjoy herself. She’d been pretty bored and lonely lately.

Somebody knocked on the front door to the chalet. Beau went to open it with a defeated sigh.

“Hello, can I help—”

The woman on the doorstep was huge. Beau was not short by any means and usually towered over other women and was not used to being in people’s shadow. She more often than not detested it. The woman who was currently towering over her might have been close to two meters tall. She was broad too, in the way that screamed rather than suggested a wealth in strength.

“Where is this?” the woman asked softly.

“Uh,” said Beau. She was still staring at the woman. Her clothing was odd: layers of thick cloth and dark leathers wrapped over her arms and torso, her shoulders draped in what was probably real fur, though Beau couldn’t identify the animal. Her dark hair was plaited and knotted over her temples with glass beads that glittered in the afternoon’s sunlight, white and blue and black. The woman was staring back at Beau with a quiet intensity that made her skin prickle.

“Where am—?”

“This is a skiing chalet, ma’am,” answered Beau stiffly. “We offer hot drinks, food, minor equipment repairs, lifts up and down the mountain, and one-on-one teaching. That would be from yours truly. The teaching. I’m a skiing instructor here at the chalet.” Beau bit down hard on the inside of her cheek.

“Ah.” The woman peered over Beau’s shoulder into the chalet. “Okay. I didn’t understand most of that. Goodbye.” She turned and began walking away.

“Woah! Wait!” Beau followed the woman. She caught up after a few steps and immediately started shivering. She was wearing only a thin fleece and the air was biting at her skin through the fabric. “Are you sure I can’t help you?”

As she came closer Beau noticed the snow clinging to the woman’s hair and clothing. There was some wear and tear to what she was wearing on her chest and arms that made Beau’s stomach turn; the woman looked like she’d slept rough, possibly for more than one night in a row, possibly after losing a fight to somebody. This wouldn’t be the first time Beau had found a drunkard on the chalet’s doorstep, though usually they were there waiting for her first thing in the morning, not knocking politely in the mid-afternoon and asking for directions.

“I can help you get back to the city if you like?” suggested Beau.

The woman paused and stared at Beau. Her eyes were odd.

Beau swallowed. “Have you been camping? We can supply you with…food…and stuff.”

“You want to help me?”

“Sure. It’s kind of my job.”

“I would like to drink something warm then.”

Beau smiled and opened her arms. “Great!” She immediately pulled her arms back in and shivered, tucking her hands deep into her armpits. She gave the woman another once-over. “…Do you have money on you?”

The woman looked away.

“Ah. Well, that’s okay,” said Beau. “It’s on me. You look like you’ve had a rough time.”

The woman’s name was Yasha. She didn’t give Beau a surname, and in fact said very little else as she drank her hot chocolate and stared around at the chalet’s reception hall.

They sat in one of the cubicles against the big floor-to-ceiling windows that surrounded three sides of the room, on the benches on either side of a stained wooden table. The view was good that day. The sky was a shocking blue that faded to white at the horizon and the mountainsides glowed with young snow from last night. But Yasha stared at the indoors, strangely. There wasn’t much to see. There were the benches for skiers and hikers to rest, the café-like cubicles for visitors to eat and drink, the door to the kitchens, the door to the porch area, the door downstairs to the storage room, the cheap paintings of anonymous European landscapes hanging on the pine plank walls. It was standard fare for a mountain chalet. But Yasha was fascinated.

“You a tourist?”

Yasha turned her odd eyes back towards Beau. “Of a sort.”

“You like hiking?” asked Beau, cheek pressed into one palm resting on the table between them.

“Uh, yes.”

“What’s your favourite mountain?” Beau immediately wanted to throw herself through the big window to her left. She was on a roll today, like a flaming tire tumbling down a hill.

“Uh.”

“Don’t answer that. Would you like some supplies?” Beau asked, pointing a thumb behind her towards the door. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff for hikers, crazy campers…whatever. If you’re heading out again soon, I can grab you some stuff…” She trailed off and narrowed her eyes, then leant over the table and whispered, “I won’t charge you for the tools. I’ll just say one of our regulars borrowed them, nobody will give a shit.”

Yasha’s face didn’t change. It made Beau a little uncomfortable, how difficult it was to read anything but confused indifference from her expression. “I would like that. If that is okay. I will take a small blade—” she brought a finger and thumb together to indicate the length, “—for cutting things apart. And a map.”

“Can do.”

Beau left the lounge area for a minute to fetch the items from the storage room downstairs. The basement was cold and smelled weird, lit by hanging lamps for most of the year since the narrow windows near the ceiling were usually blocked by snow. There was an older woman sitting in the corner fiddling with the buckles of a rescue sled. She nodded at Beau as she passed on her way to the shelves before going back to her work.

The items Yasha needed were high demand, so Beau had no trouble finding them. She tucked them all under one arm and turned to the stairway, before thinking for a moment, and turning back to grab a small waterproof bag large enough to carry the items and more. It was the kind that strapped around the waist and was a bright orange colour: not exactly fitting of Yasha’s style, but it was the thought that counted, as far as Beau was concerned.

She returned to the main floor to find Yasha finishing off her drink. Beau dropped the items from her arms, proudly presented the little swiss army knife to Yasha before dropping it into a pocket of the bag.

Yasha took the bag and tucked it away somewhere into her furs. “Beau?”

“Yeah?”

“What…what nation is this? The one that we are in right now?”

Beau tapped her fingers against the edge of the table. This poor woman must have been hiking for a while to be so confused. She spread the map out over the table between them.

“France. A few miles from the Italian border to the south.” She tapped their location on the map, near the centre. “Another few miles from the Swiss border to the north. Almost two thousand meters above sea-level. You could catch a bus to Geneva easy, get there before sunset if you’re lucky. I can point you on your way if you like.”

Something appeared to dawn on Yasha’s face. She nodded slowly. “I see. France?”

“Yeah, France…” Beau repeated.

“I have travelled a long way.”

Beau sucked her teeth. “I could drive you up to Geneva myself, actually. I’ve got my passport in the car today. It would be no trouble at all.”

Before Beau could finish her last sentence Yasha had stood and picked up the map and walked away from the table, folding up the map as she went. “Thank you for the hot drink, Beau,” she said simply, and walked out of the chalet.

Beau stared at the chalet door as it swung shut. Then she stared at the mug. It was empty, there was just a dark brown ring at the very bottom left of the hot chocolate. Beau felt cold again and wrapped her arms tightly around herself, frowning at the mug.

She wished, not the first time, that she was a better conversationalist. She had been left with the distinct impression that there was more to that woman than met the eye, and more than just a chilly wilderness lover with a bad sense of direction. Her eyes had been so odd – Beau closed her own and recalled them, blue and purple, like the colour of wildflowers – so odd and beautiful. Beauregard groaned and dropped her forehead down onto the rough wooden tabletop with a thud.

* * *

Caleb remained morose for the rest of the day although he didn’t run into Veth again, for which he was immensely grateful. He hadn’t anticipated Veth’s liveliness and it had drained him like a marathon. He had apparently exhausted his ability to converse for the foreseeable future and was wallowing in a certain kind of tired awkwardness, praying for nobody else to speak to him. And his misery must have been palpable because everybody he shared a room with that day gave Caleb a wide berth and said nothing more than a word or two to him until the workday ended. They practically turned away from him whenever he came near. Caleb wondered dryly if this power he held was a kind of negative charge in and of itself.

The air was colder than the night before when Caleb finally left the main building. It was barely sundown, but he could see his breath hover before his nose and felt the tips of his fingers sting fiercely. He rubbed his hands together, puffing over his freezing red fingers, and hurried alone towards the carpark, fumbling for his keys as he went. His index and thumb found the car key and pulled it from his pocket as he turned a corner to see his piece of shit car waiting for him.

The piece of shit car had been his father’s before Caleb’s and a friend of his father’s before him. It was built from almost solid metal and painted a dirty red and made the sound of a dying animal whenever he killed the engine. The piece of shit car would likely outlive Caleb, by his estimation, even if it often struggled to climb hills in the cold, much like Caleb did himself.

Currently, the piece of shit car was parked next to a small floating blue-purple glow. Caleb almost dropped his car keys.

“What in the shitting…”

Caleb gaped at the glow. He slapped a numb palm against a numb cheek in the hopes of shocking himself back into reality, but the glow remained.

“Scheiße.”

The glow was identical to the one he had seen the night before. It floated a foot from the ground, about halfway between Caleb and his piece of shit car. It made no noise. It was perfectly stationary. He had no better of an idea what it might be than the last time he had seen it.

Caleb gripped his car key and approached the glow, cursing himself for his curiosity, and cursing the nervous shake in his arms.

As he came closer the glow dimmed. Like it’s shy, he thought madly.

Caleb slowed his approach and crouched down to the slushy floor of the car park. He shuffled closer and again the floating light dimmed, but also shifted from purple to a deep red-orange glow. Caleb cocked his head. It was the colour of an amber traffic light now, but still no bigger than a firefly.

Caleb looked behind himself at the car park. There was another dozen or so cars still parked nearby but he was currently alone. The place was quiet as the dead.

He looked back at the glow, gritted his teeth, and reached his hand out. The same weird feeling washed over him as before. He felt ill. He felt like his bones were about to rattle right out of his skin.

He pulled his arm back and angrily rubbed his hands over his face, digging his bitten-short nails into his hairline and hissing, cursing himself more, muttering and begging himself to stand up and get into the car and drive home. He hated himself.

“Oh…you are making this _so_ hard for me,” he hissed at the little orange glow. “But I cannot turn away now. I cannot. _Fuck_.”

Caleb shuffled one last step closer to the glow. He glared at the glow, daring it to make even an ounce of sense, and hesitantly reached out the hand holding his car key, thinking that a safe experiment should begin with him touching the subject with an instrument, rather than his bare hand, in case of danger to his health. The absurdity of this train of thought was lost on Caleb until much later.

As his hand drew near the glow changed colour again, changing from its deep orange into a softer, lighter shade. It was the welcoming colour of caramel and runny honey. Caleb dimly registered that it was the same colour as the fur of his childhood cat just as the key in his hand made contact with the very heart of the glow.

White-hot pain ripped through Caleb, making him gasp and fall to his knees. The skin on his forearms burned like it was being torn away from the flesh in ribbons and his eyeballs might have been melting. He thought, in a far-off kind of way, that he had been struck by lightning.

He lost consciousness.

For a while, though he could not say how long, he was in the dark.

He was probably alone. He couldn’t hear anything.

Then there were hands reaching for him in the dark. They held his face. Somebody asked him for his name with an unfamiliar and gentle voice. He couldn’t answer, he didn’t understand, he was afraid.

Now somebody was shouting at him.

He stood in darkness. Or maybe he was floating, it was hard to tell, but there was nothing around him. There were hands around his throat, pressing and insistent, and a foreign voice in his ear.

He started to struggle away, panicking. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t see. He wanted to speak.

The hands loosened their grip. He heard somebody take a deep measured breath somewhere close by.

The darkness remained but his senses sharpened by an ounce.

“Who are you?”

He opened his mouth to answer but felt himself be suddenly yanked forward by the wrists.

Pain shot through the skin of his forearms, beginning as just needlepoint pricks below his wrists then down, down over the backs of his arms in long screaming lines. It was dragging him away from the unfamiliar voice and the unfamiliar hands, backwards, downwards, or upwards, he couldn’t tell. He heard the voice shout out again in anger but very far away this time.

Caleb opened his eyes.

He was laying on the ground beside his piece of shit car. His back was freezing cold where the slush was soaking through his clothing between his jacket and the top of his trousers, and most of his body hurt. The awful purple glow had vanished. He closed his eyes again, hoping to die.

Eventually, admitting that he was not dying, he became too uncomfortable and rolled onto his side. Both of his arms were bleeding.

He quickly lifted them up into the light of the closest lamppost and stared. There were three long and shallow gashes along the backs of his forearms, small and clean and straight. Six perfect cuts that had not been there when he had passed out. They were bleeding very slowly, as if they had been bleeding for a while, and the slush below him was an unpleasant shade of grey-pink.

Caleb sat in the slush for another minute in silence.

After a minute of silence, he calmly stood up, picked up his key from where he had dropped it in the slush, opened the car door, sat down in the driver’s seat, shut the door, and locked it.

He sat still and quiet for a moment longer.

“I have…bandages at home,” he said to himself. “I need to wrap my arms.” He drove slowly away from the laboratory and into the city and towards his apartment.


	2. a troubled stream from a pure source

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The support for this fic was been such a surprise I'm a little overwhelmed. I'm very new to the CR fandom so my characterisation is a little wobbly, but I hope to get better as I go.  
> Also I should have said this in the last chapter's notes but the magic in this fic does not resemble D&D mechanics at all. It's mostly nonsense logic so don't expect too many "real" spells lol. I'm just having fun.  
> Thanks for reading! And happy new year!

Caleb had learned at a young age how to take care of his own minor injuries. He was never athletic or particularly mischievous, but he had a habit of finding himself hurt nevertheless. He fell out of trees, closed doors on his fingers, tripped on the pavement, crashed his bike into bushes. He was often teased for it by the other children and was told he was weak, unlucky, and awfully clumsy for returning every day with a new bruise or cut or scrape. Although, he had a thick hide for cruel words. Caleb would let the teasing pass through him like a cold breeze.

He didn’t mind being weak; he knew he was smarter than all of his classmates combined. But his poor mother eventually lost her patience and taught him how to clean a cut, soothe a carpet burn, dress a simple bandage, and he would thank her through bitter childish tears.

As Caleb went through the motions the morning following his incident in the car park, he thanked his mother again.

The cuts had stopped bleeding not long after he had started driving that night. But before they had, the blood ruined his shirt and stained his trouser legs where it dripped from his elbows onto his lap. It had seemed like so much blood yesterday. Now, the cuts had sealed up and begun to scab.

Caleb admired them in the buzzing light of his tiny bathroom. Pink, thin, perfectly straight from his wrists to an inch from his elbows over the backs of his arms. They looked like the scratches of a cat who had lashed out when Caleb had reached out to pet it, the kind of scratch he was rather familiar with. But there had been no cat in that car park, just him and the horrible source-less purple light.

Caleb wrapped his arms up in new bandages, took his medicine, shaved, and dressed.

The following days were normal. They were absurdly boring, in fact, when compared to the beginning of Caleb’s week. He almost began wondering if he really had imagined the floating lights and had instead passed out in the car park from exhaustion or anaemia. But his memory never failed him. And the itch in his healing arms was persistent. He sat behind his desk, copying formulae and readings, fiddling with the ends of the bandages, and often idly scratching at the back of his arms before he caught himself.

The cuts healed quickly. At the end of each day, he changed the bandages in his tiny bathroom and found the six uniform lines between his wrists and elbows ever thinner and fainter. They really did look like cat scratches.

By Friday he abandoned the bandages. But he left his shirt sleeves rolled down over the marks.

He all but forgot about the little cuts until around mid-afternoon, when moving a pile of folders from one end of the building to another and carrying them by himself along the narrow hallways. He had the folders in one arm, his key card in the free hand, and was inspecting a coffee stain that had manifested on his lanyard when he turned a corner and collided with something small coming from the opposite direction which bounced off his hip and shouted out, “SHIT!”

Caleb dropped the files, of course. He was too shocked to swear in the moment but managed to make an undignified noise somewhere between a gasp and a yelp before stumbling backwards away from the person he had run headlong into.

Veth was sitting on the floor of the corridor, surrounded by his folders, blinking up at him.

“Oh, hello Caleb.”

“Uh. Hallo. I’m sorry, I didn’t see – I was not looking where I was going.”

“Oh, no, it’s my fault. I’m very quiet, people miss me a lot.” She took Caleb’s offered hand and stood up, then winced and rubbed her shoulder. “You might owe me a drink for this bruise though.”

“Oh, ah, um.” Caleb looked away quickly and busied himself with gathering up his scattered folders. “I would gladly, ah, owe you, Veth. But I am not much fun to be around, I assure you. In a bar or whatever it is you are suggesting. I am not a fun person.” He straightened up and looked at a spot five inches from Veth’s face. “I am sorry.”

She stared at him for another second before cackling. “I’m not coming on to you, buddy, don’t worry,” she said, and held up her hand. There was a simple gold band on one finger. “I just really like the booze the people around here make. Called lager, isn’t it?”

“Oh.” Caleb felt even stupider than he had a moment ago.

“Hey, I’ll help you carry that,” Veth said before Caleb could object, and picked up the last folder, which had skidded past her and hit the far wall. If he weren’t practically glowing with embarrassment, he would have pointed out that he could easily carry all the folders himself with one arm so long as nobody else tackled him. “I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry anyways. Where’re you headed?”

Caleb led the way. He felt his face slowly cool as they walked but remained silent and unhappy for a short while. It was at the forefront of his mind that he had already been bullied into promising this woman that he would accompany her up a mountain the next day. If there was anything that he could do to remedy the situation, now was the time to do it.

“How long have you been married?” he asked as they passed a hallway-long series of wide windows facing the white-headed hills. Winter was growing old but not yet weaker; much of the land around the lake was still blanketed by pure snow.

“Almost six years,” Veth answered. “He’s… well, I’ve been very busy lately, so I haven’t seen him for a while. He’s with our son back home. That little toy you returned to me the other day, that’s my son’s, Luc’s.”

“What does your husband do?”

She smiled. “Chemistry. He’s a very smart man. Very smart.” She was quiet for a moment and turned her head towards the long window, out towards the hills. Her fingertips tapped against the card of the folder in her arms. “I haven’t seen them – him or Luc – since I moved here. I missed our five-year anniversary.”

Caleb didn’t know what to say. Veth looked back at him and gave him a weak smile.

“I think I just wanted to say that out loud to somebody. Sorry.”

“No need to apologise. It can be hard, being so far away from your family. It is hard.”

She gave him another hard look, like she was unpicking an equation. She seemed happy with the result she calculated and looked back at the hallway ahead. “Don’t feel too sorry for me. I’m a tough cookie. I can hold out a little longer. Besides, what makes a five-year anniversary so special anyway? It’s only our base-ten human bias making the numbers five, ten, twenty-five, etcetera so attractive.”

“Ja, exactly. Look on the bright side. In an alternate universe we might have twelve fingers total.”

“Yes! Then in that universe our six-year anniversary would be the one to celebrate.” She cackled.

“No reason why not to, in this universe.”

Veth appeared to think about it for a moment. “Yeah. Fuck it, I will. I’ll get back to Yeza before our sixth. I’ll get outta here and treat him like a king before the year ends, absolutely.” A fire shone in her dark eyes and her grip tightened on the folder in her arms. “He can wait for me a little longer.”

They came to the lab after another flight of stairs. Caleb unlocked the door with his card and shouldered through the door, Veth close at his heels.

It was one of the many tiny offices at the lab and they all looked more or less the same; a dusty wooden desk, two if the room was big enough, one wall lined with filing cabinets, the other with pinned-up charts and calendars and clocks. The carpet was brown, the walls and ceilings beige. Whoever worked in this room had spent no time accessorizing. The only piece of personality was an exceptionally ugly Darth Vader-shaped telephone sitting on the desk.

Caleb dropped the folders next to Darth Vader and went to unlock the filing cabinets. It took him a moment to find the correct drawer.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

Caleb looked up from the ring of cabinet keys in his hand. “Eh?”

Veth pointed to his arm, where his shirtsleeve had ridden up far enough to reveal the lower wraps of his bandages.

“Ah…a cat scratched me,” he lied.

“What did you do to deserve that?”

Caleb shrugged and pulled open the correct drawer. “I wanted to pet it; it didn’t want to be pet. A necessary risk.”

“You didn’t strike me as the type to put yourself in harm’s way for any reason,” she said with a crooked grin as she handed over the last folder.

“Oh, but for a cat,” he said softly. “It is worth it.”

Veth giggled. “This happen to you a lot then?”

“Often enough. I cannot help myself. But I am used to it; I am a very clumsy person.”

Veth seemed to think for a moment. “Here.” She pulled something from a pocket of her corduroy dress and patiently held out her hand. “For good luck.”

Caleb put out his hand. She tipped a shiny blue button into his palm.

“It’s not lucky, not really” she said with a sniff. “But I would give them to Yeza sometimes. He’s clumsy as hell and it makes him feel less anxious when he has one of my lucky buttons in his pocket. Maybe you’ll feel better too.”

“Thank you, Veth.”

She asked him where to meet the next day for their trip up the mountain. He told her about the bus to take over border and to the foot of the alps, and that he would meet her at the funicular at nine in the morning, that he would buy their tickets in advance, and gave her a short list of food and other things she should bring with her. He assured her that they would not be going very far up the mountain, just far enough to get a good view of the city and the valley. Then, after being asked, he assured her they would not be crossing any frozen lakes or rivers.

After that Veth left him with a smile and a wave. Caleb watched her go, leaning against the wall by the big windows, feeling oddly calm. He was surprised by how little of his energy had been drained by the conversation; in fact, he even felt a little braver than before.

Later in the day, Caleb returned to the computer lab where he had first seen the strange glow. He had no good reason for it. Perhaps he wanted some closure before the weekend began. Perhaps he was hoping to see the glow again and to collect more data on it. Perhaps he was paranoid. Caleb opened the door to the lab as slow as if there was a sleeping dragon laying in the middle of that room. He pressed himself to the doorframe, holding his breath, feeling remarkably stupid in the process, and peeked inside.

It was dark. It was silent. He saw nothing of a supernatural nature hiding between the ordinary rows of ordinary desks.

Caleb flicked the overhead light on and took a deep breath. “Okay, you big coward,” he muttered to himself, “There is nothing to fear. Just computers. Like always.”

He went straight to the memory banks where he remembered finding the glow. There was nothing there.

Caleb let out a breath and rubbed his palms together. It felt good to be standing firmly in reality and to find exactly what one expects to. On a whim, Caleb crouched down to the particular box that had been bleeping that night. He felt around over its top and around the sides, looking for the device that had been plugged into it, but found nothing.

“Odd…” Caleb continued to talk aloud to himself. “I wonder if you were retrieved by whoever put you there. Most likely.” He straightened up. “Well, none of my business.”

* * *

Beau had been dreaming of thunder lately. She would wake up with ringing ears in the dead of night but open her blinds to find a clear star-speckled sky, no storm since that night of the thundersnow.

She spent her free time at the chalet, when not handing out supplies to hikers or teaching British teenagers how to put on their ski boots, watching the sky, frowning at every cottony cloud that passed overhead, waiting for something. Every second felt to her like the heavy silence between the flash and the boom.

Friday afternoon, she left the chalet early and took a ski lift up the mountain alone with one of the rental snowboards. She figured it would help her: the thrill usually cleared her head or released her frustrations, whichever was needed more at the time. The sun was low in the sky. Even at midday it would barely be able to lift itself over the mountains’ spine this time of the year. Beau glared at the heavy sun fidgeted with the hem of her gloves before gruffly pulling her goggles down over her face, twisting into position, and dropping down onto the slope.

It felt good. Every part of her body was humming like a tuning fork, flying, falling, in complete control. Beau had never been particularly strong, but she was quick, and she was clever, and she treated this slope as nothing short of a challenge.

She ended her trip down the slope at the chalet but would have gone the last half-mile down if her car weren’t there behind the building. Beau dropped off the gear, cleaned up, checked out, and drove down the mountain.

She had been right; she felt much better after the slope. She wasn’t exactly at the top of her game again and there was still a strange and persistent feeling of anticipation, but now she felt strong rather than anxious. There was now a charge in her blood that she hadn’t felt since that strange woman named Yasha turned up at the chalet.

Beau didn’t take the turning off the main road down the mountain which would take her back to her cabin. She continued north, her passport in her pocket. She deserved this.

* * *

Caleb had realised, a little too late for comfort, that he had no food for the hike the next day stored in his apartment. He left his building in darkness and wandered down the street towards the nearest supermarket. Most of them sold the usual sort of things mountain people needed, Caleb reasoned, having not been on too many high-altitude trips himself but familiar enough with the hobby to know what to bring.

With his hands shoved deep in his pockets and huffing clouds of fog, he was almost blinded by the fluorescent lights of the convenience store. He stepped inside. Blinking, he peered around the store, and seeing that he was likely the only customer this late in the evening he shuffled dutifully towards the snack and hobby section.

After a couple of minutes, he held a small collection of high-sugar bars and a little hand warmer that he could fit inside his glove. He turned the corner of an aisle and spotted a woman standing opposite.

Caleb choked and backed away out of sight. His heart jumped and stuttered in his chest. The woman in the other aisle hadn’t noticed him, as far as he could tell, she had been facing away from him, but still he barely breathed as he hid.

He peeked around the corner, balancing his weight on a tall stack of cereal boxes, to be sure that he had seen who he thought he had seen.

Her name was Beauregard. Caleb remembered that, like he remembered the name of almost every person he had ever met, and certainly the name of every person he should avoid at all costs. She was tall, almost as tall as him, lean and wiry and built like an Olympic runner. He remembered that the first time he had met her she had worn her hair in a tight bun; now it was held back in a braid above a choppy undercut that looked like she’d shaved it herself with the help of only one mirror. She was currently wearing a loose top and cargo trousers and stood next to an unfamiliar woman in the drinks’ aisle. The other girl was already very drunk and chattering to Beauregard in slurred French. Beauregard was responding with brief fluent phrases, more interested in the booze than the girl.

Caleb hid himself behind the cereal again.

 _That woman_ was here with somebody she’d picked up at a bar, Caleb deduced quickly. She was interested in just one thing this evening and would not take kindly to seeing Caleb’s face. It would be for the best if he stayed hidden.

He heard two pairs of footsteps approaching his hiding place and scurried away to the far end of the aisle.

This continued for a few minutes. He thanked the stars that nobody else was shopping at the time, because he was quite sure he looked absurd ducking between the aisles and rushing away from the two women working their way through the store. He was aware that at some point he would also have to find his way to the front and buy his things. But this was a far lower priority than avoiding Beauregard.

They almost caught him near the end of the ridiculous sequence. He left the last aisle before the checkout desks a second before Beauregard and her drunk French girl did at the opposite end. Caleb turned on his heel, but not fast enough to miss Beauregard narrowing her eyes in his direction over the girl’s shoulder.

Caleb pressed the heel of his palm to his racing heart and took deep breaths, staring wide-eyed at the fruit and vegetables display he had pressed his back to, willing himself to be even an ounce less scared of this woman. He waited for her to appear next to him at any second. He waited for her to find him and punch his lights out. His heart only beat faster.

One hand clumsily plunged into his trouser pocket to close around the single little lucky button Veth had given him. His hand tightened around it to the point of pain. He struggled to breathe.

At the same time Caleb noticed subtle movement in the corner of his eye. The fruit were moving.

He watched in numb terror as an orange shivered in its basket by his elbow, next to a similarly quaking bundle of bananas, above a tray of shivering red apples. He thought, madly, that the fruit were about to explode around of him.

The orange dissolved. So did the apple. Caleb gaped, his heart frozen between panicked pulses, as a half dozen of the fruit beside him seemed to transmute into piles of…

He blinked. They were buttons. Little piles of shiny blue buttons.

The sight was bizarre enough to stop his panic attack in its tracks. His heart slowed to an almost-normal pace. His breathing deepened and steadied, he loosened his grip on the button in his pocket, and he stood up straighter.

Caleb turned away from the fruit display and slapped himself hard across the left cheek. “I am going mad,” he told himself quietly. “I am finally going mad.”

The woman named Beauregard was gone. She had left the shop while Caleb had watched a fruit bowl-worth of produce spontaneously transform into haberdashery. He considered this a sign to quit while things were going his way and bought his hiking supplies and almost-jogged his way through the streets back to his building and up to his apartment.

Caleb dropped to his knees in the hallway of his apartment and groaned, covering his face with his hands. He didn’t know what to do with himself. But there were things he had promised he would do the next day, so he stood up, dutifully packed his bag for tomorrow, changed the bandages on his arms, and twenty minutes later collapsed onto his bed.

He placed the little blue button Veth had given him on his nightstand. It sat innocuously by his glasses. Good luck, he thought dryly as he turned off the lights, such very good luck.

* * *

Beau never had liked driving late at night much. She hated the murk outside the twin white cones of her car’s headlights. She hated how endless it seemed, how her imagination would supply her with grim suggestions of what might be just beyond the lamplight, or the rows of red cat’s eyes lining the road. There could be a cliff there, or just trees, or a brown bear that had wandered across the Italian border waiting to cross the road. Luckily, she knew these roads well enough in the light of day and recalled where the land dropped away and where the treeline began and where she was most likely to hit rabbits. But the knowledge made her no less unsettled by the dark.

When other kids had asked Beauregard what she would wish for if she could pick any superpower she had always wished for night-vision, like an owl. Other kids wanted to fly or turn invisible or be strong enough to lift buses with one hand. They read more comic books than her.

But Beau wanted to _know_ what was out there. She didn’t want any uncertainty.

She drove slowly up the winding roads and repressed a yawn against the back of her wrist. She had considered getting wasted with the French girl and just driving home in the morning but had thought better of it. History told her that she would hate herself more in the morning if she stayed the night than she hated herself in the moment now, driving up the mountain at one in the morning. And she wanted quite badly to preserve the fragile sense of confidence that she had only just regained earlier that day.

The car’s lights passed over the snow-swamped sign indicating her turnoff. Twenty seconds later she took a right turn and slowed down, now driving up a narrow road between dense trees.

The sky above her was clear. She peered up at constellations that she remembered the names of from school, the same stars she could have seen in California when the skies were clean, like milky-white speckles thrown from a painter’s brush across a dark canvas, and the pale fat moon. As much as she hated feeling enclosed and surrounded by walls of darkness Beau loved the clean skies of the alps. Even in the valley there was a light smog that obscured the sky over Geneva, and she rarely saw stars as bright as these back home.

She locked up the car in its shed and made her way across the knee-deep snow to her front door with an unopened bottle of wine in one hand. The motion-activated light hanging above the awning flickered on.

She stopped at the foot of the porch. The deck was small, big enough only for a rickety bench and two fake plants that had been there when she moved in the previous winter, but large enough to shelter two or three people under its wooden awning. Currently, there was something tucked into the far corner of the porch by the front door.

It looked like loose tarp. Beau tilted her head to get a better look, aided only by the dim light coming from the porch lamp. It looked to her like tarp that had blown from somebody’s camp up the hill and onto her front lawn, maybe ten foot across when unfolded. It was a dirty dark green or brown where it wasn’t dusted by snow and crumpled like a giant balled-up napkin.

Beau sniffed and looked around. She saw no other signs of litter or stray camping equipment near her cabin.

She stepped up onto the deck towards the tarp.

It moved; Beau was reminded in that short heart-stopping moment of a bat unfolding its wings before taking flight. But this thing did not stop unfolding.

Dusky sheets of snow slid from its surface as the tarp-thing shivered and shambled out from the dark corner of the porch, jerking skeins of brown-grey fabric-skin towards Beau, to either side of itself, like limbs to support its awful movement. She wanted so badly to catch sight of a creature hidden underneath the tarp, like a skeleton under skin, but there was nothing— it was an empty horrible thing.

But it moved slowly, ungracefully, and sluggish, like it wasn’t certain of its own progress. Or perhaps it was confused by being recently woken from its sleep by her arrival.

Either way, Beau took that opportunity to turn and run.

She dropped the wine bottle and followed her own tracks through the snow towards the car shed. Although her legs suddenly felt heavy, she dragged them through the already loosened snow, feeling her breath quicken and her chest seize in panic. She could hear rustling behind her. She could also hear, underneath the dry rustles, the sound of a low wheezing – not quite the sound of a creature breathing, closer to wind whistling through the torn fabric of an abandoned tent.

Beau risked a glance over her shoulder as she ran. The thing was following her, tumbling over itself with unnatural angular movements, and was catching up.

She didn’t need to wonder what would happen if the thing reached her; there was a bone-deep intuition letting her know that this thing was _wrong_ , that it should not exist, and she should do anything in her power to avoid touching it. Perhaps a dumb animalistic instinct woken from where it had been sleeping between the coils of DNA by her sheer terror.

So, Beau ran faster towards the shed. There were a few trees close to the tiny garage, one close enough for her purpose. She closed the distance, squared her shoulders, and jumped up towards the lowest branch. Her hands closed around the bough, her palms stinging from the cold and the impact. She hauled herself up in the same movement to curl her body securely around the branch near the trunk.

Something impacted against the wall of the garage below her with a wheezing thud. Beau looked down in time to see the tarp-thing collapse into a sagging pile in the snowdrift. It stopped moving for the moment.

Beau crawled along the branch, perfectly balancing her weight without taking her eyes off the tarp-thing for even a second and easily hopped over onto the roof of the garage.

Like any other building in the country, the roof of her little car shed was steep and sloped to allow the heavy snow to slide off in winter, to keep it from collapsing under the weight. The shape would make scaling it difficult. With a grunt, Beau hooked the tips of her now almost-numb fingers over the ridge and hauled herself up, but her feet slipped on the packed snow and suddenly all her weight was hanging from her hands.

Her hip slammed painfully into the slates and her feet dangled in thin air. She heard interested shuffles coming from below her.

“God fucking—” Beau grit her teeth and pulled herself up fully onto the roof. She panted and shivered as she found a more comfortable position to sit for a moment on the ridge. She rubbed her sore hip.

The thing was still slumped against the right wall of the shed. She could hear it wheezing and rustling. However, her vision was pretty poor now that the light outside the cabin had switched off, taking her ability to perfectly track the thing. Not allowing herself to panic, she thought for a moment. She still had her keys in one pocket, remarkably. It was a blessing she hadn’t dropped them in her fright along with the wine.

Beau reached down towards the slates by her knees. She rattled them, kicked a couple, and after a moment felt one slide loose in her grip. She hefted it up, testing its weight, then twisted in place to face the trees behind the shed.

With one practiced swing Beau hurled the broken tile away into the darkness. There was a second of silence. Then, a resounding _crack_ and a _thump_ echoed through the trees.

Instantly, the thing was moving in that direction with a chorus of rustles and sighs.

Beau had no time to celebrate her success – although she had correctly guessed that since the thing had no eyes it was following her through other means, and she wholly believed this deduction was worthy of applause – she hooked her aching fingers over the gable and swung down over the front of the garage, then dropped silently to the ground.

Beau had never unlocked her car so quickly. In a panicked but focused frenzy she opened up the shed, skid over to the driver’s door, unlocked the door, threw herself inside, closed the door, locked the door, took a deep shuddering breath, and started the engine with shaking hands.

The engine was _loud_. Beau cursed and sped up her movements again, hurling strings of verbal abuse at her shitty second-hand car until it finally began moving out of the garage and into the open.

About halfway between the garage and the road leading away from her cabin, something dark and misshapen hurtled out of the treeline and towards the vehicle. It crashed into the side of the car, making Beau yell and instinctually swerve away, but not slow down. She corrected her course in time to avoid the low stone wall at the mouth of the driveway and glanced up to the reverse mirror.

In the path behind her was the tarp-thing. It was laying in a lump between the wheel-tracks in the snow, slowly reinflating after the impact, like a dark lung.

Beau looked back at the road. Her numb fingers tightened around the steering wheel and her eyes stung with tears. Her bruised hip throbbed. There was melting snow in her hair and all over her front, dripping over her brow. She must have cut her hand on the slate without realising earlier; there was watery blood smeared across the top of the steering wheel.

She considered herself a very brave person and always had. She was usually the one to stand up to assholes and chase off wild animals when others backed down. For once, she was glad to have run away.


	3. the heart must pause to breathe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very long chapter! A chapter I considered cutting in half but didn't! I hope you like it even though it's very long and mostly dialogue (this is the chapter where things start coming together).  
> Thank you again for reading and leaving those lovely comments, they mean the world 💕💕

It was late. She was uncertain exactly how late, but certainly later than Beau was usually comfortable to be awake at, having always been a naturally early riser. She decided it was better not to know. There was no clock in her car, she had no watch on her wrist, and she made sure not to make eye contact with any clocks in the chalet as she unlocked the front door, fetched the first aid kit from the front desk, and made straight towards the stairs down into the chalet basement.

The overhead light blinked on, revealing the rows of metal shelving and low benches and racks of rental skis, exactly how the room looked during the day. The air was cold and smelled of dusty plastic. It was totally quiet, refreshingly lonely.

But it wasn’t right. Beau knew it wasn’t, felt it in her bones and under her skin, that everything was wrong. She could look at the most normal thing in the world such as a discarded backpack sitting at the foot of the stairway and be reminded of the horrible empty thing that had chased her away from the cabin.

Beau went over to one of the benches where people would usually get their boots fitted, gingerly lowered herself down and wincing when her hip pulsed with a now-familiar dull pain. Her palm had stopped bleeding halfway up the mountain. She took a moment to assess herself, deciding her other injuries were minor enough to disregard and that there was nothing to be done about the bruise on her hip besides live with it, before opening up the first aid box. After sanitising the cut across her palm and wrapping it up Beau kicked some spare coats and exercise mats into one corner of the chilly room. She checked the door at the top of the stairs was locked and double-checked the tiny windows were secured shut, despite them being entirely blocked by two feet of snow anyway. Once satisfied she burrowed into the pile of coats which would serve as a bed for the night.

She left the overhead light on. She didn’t think too hard about why.

While drifting off, face partially smothered by a fur-lined hood, Beau made some vague plans for the next day. She would tell nobody about the thing that she saw that night. Anyone would think she was crazy. She would first drive back to her cabin and look for evidence of the thing’s existence, signs of it having left the area, any information at all. Then, she would drive down to the city and book a room in a hostel somewhere. She would live in Geneva for the time being until she had a clearer plan of action and certainty of her own safety. Ideally, while in the city she would learn what do to if she were put in the same situation again. She could learn how to avoid it better, how to trick it more effectively, how to fight back, how to destroy it. If that tarp-creature had really been alive then it would follow that Beau could kill it. The idea made her blood hum briefly with anger.

A quiet part of her wished that she had friends. Anybody who might believe her, really, and could offer her some help or advice. Still trembling, Beau fell into an exhausted dreamless sleep curled up in the corner of the chalet’s basement.

* * *

Veth had been oddly anxious since Caleb met her at the funicular station. She was fidgeting, fingering the cap of a silver hip flask, and chattering about everything and nothing during their journey up the mountainside. Caleb couldn’t find the right way to ask what was bothering her. He guessed it was her pet project; she never mentioned it despite how eagerly she talked about anything else. Her nervousness reminded Caleb of his own frustration when he would hit a brick wall in his own research.

“You said that you like cats, I remember you told me the other day?” said Veth suddenly after a brief quiet respite of one and a half minutes.

“Ja.”

“Do you have one?”

“No, but I had one when I was a boy.”

“What was its name?”

“Her name was Frumpkin. We had her for many years.”

Veth nodded and scratched her neck. “Hm. Do you live alone?”

“I do.”

“Why don’t you have a cat now?”

“You are asking me a lot of questions, Veth.”

She looked wounded. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything. Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“Only a little. May I ask you some questions now?”

Her eyes flashed with something resembling panic. “Uh, I guess so,” she said weakly. “I’m not very interesting though. I’m really quite boring.”

“What brought to work at CERN?”

“A string of bad and good luck,” she answered bluntly. He didn’t get the impression that it was technically a lie.

“Do _you_ like cats?”

“I think they’re funny, cute sometimes, but they don’t like me all too much. I’m…you know, I can’t sit still for long, just can’t. I’m jittery. Cats don’t like that about me.”

Caleb nodded. “Have you ever seen some little floating lights, like blue fireflies, near the laboratory lately?”

Veth stared at him. “No.”

“Good.”

“What are y—”

“What is your favourite thing about Switzerland?”

She peered around him out of the trolley’s window. The mountains were in clear view, a chiselled pure white wall between them and the blue sky, cupping the horizon and impossibly large even from this distance. Imagining the view from the peak made Caleb’s stomach churn.

“Do I need to say it?”

“I guess not. You said that your, ah, hometown is not near any mountains like these?”

“No,” she said, leaning back in her seat. She twisted open the hip flask and took a small sip of its contents. “My town is rural, small, much smaller than this city, and some days walk from any mountains. Although, I can see mountains from my home but…they’re far off. Very far away. I’ve never been to them. So, this is...” She sent another glance out the window. “It’s humbling, I suppose. Makes me feel even smaller.”

Veth was quiet for a little while. The funicular slowly followed the curve of the foothills, climbing higher above the valley, as fluffy specks of snow flung up by the wind stuck to the glass windows. After another minute, the funicular dropped its passengers off at the base of one of the smaller mountains along the border, at a squat concrete station.

Their mountain was small, at least in comparison to the giants crouching behind it, and favourited more by hikers than by skiers. Where the dark treeline gave way to a bald top the mountain was steep and rocky.

Caleb reminded Veth that they wouldn’t be going quite that high up. Their route would be more meandering, quiet, easy going and forgiving.

Many of the other visitors they had ridden with out of the city began walking away from the station. There were a few facilities; restrooms, a small chalet offering warm food and drink and overpriced hiking supplies. Caleb mentally congratulated himself for remembering to stock up the night before.

They paused by the map posted at the edge of the checkpoint. Caleb pointed to a pale green line snaking around the lower half of the mountain.

“This is the route we will take,” he explained, running a gloved finger over the line. “If we do not leave the path we will return to this checkpoint before two in the afternoon, long before the sun sets.”

“What time is it now,” Veth asked, rummaging in her bag, and pulling out a few items. The outfit she had arrived in that morning was suitable for the weather and activity. Her many layers of fleece and polyester must have kept her remarkably warm but also conjured the unfortunate illusion that she was almost as wide as she was tall. “I don’t have a watch on me, sorry.”

“Ten twenty-two,” he answered without looking away from the map.

She stared up at him. “Okay, that’s weird.”

“Not weird at all.”

“Have you taken this route before?”

“Ja. It is my favourite. Not many others take it, I have found. People prefer a challenge. I prefer quiet.” He drew his hand away from the map, then added, “It has a nice view too, of course. Did you bring a camera?”

“Yep.” She patted up a black leather case slung around her neck.

“Gut,” he said, then walked away towards one of the paths cutting into the trees. Quick footsteps followed behind him.

As they passed under the snow-heavy boughs of firs Caleb tried to recall the last time he had gone on a hike with another person. It must have been a while ago, and certainly not in this country. It may have been during his time at university. He had been invited on many occasions by his co-workers on weekend trips into the alps before in the past few years but had always declined, always too busy, always overwhelmed by the idea of joining a group of five to seven strangers for a whole day of awkward conversations. He had figured that choice was always for the best. It had never seemed fair to him on those kind people who invited him; he would have only been a miserable addition to their trip.

But the silence that settled around him and Veth as they walked the first half hour along the route was not awkward, as far as Caleb could judge. Veth seemed at peace and happy to trot along beside him and stare around at the monochrome forest. She sometimes flinched when a shelf of snow slid from a branch and landed on the path ahead of them, but then always replaced her look of surprise with a smile of genuine curiosity.

As for Caleb, he was not bothered by the companionship. He would not have gone so far as to say that he was glad she was there but was content to hear her footsteps crunch alongside his.

After almost an hour of walking Veth asked, in the abrupt way that she tended to, “Why didn’t you bring a camera?”

“Ah, I, uh...” Caleb fidgeted with a loose thread hanging from the bottom of one glove. “I have been on this route many times. I do not need new photographs of the view. And, ah, I have a pretty—a pretty spot-on memory.” He grinned stiffly and tapped his temple. “I will not forget the view anyways.”

She widened her eyes. “A photographic memory?”

“Just about.”

“Are you the same with numbers?”

Caleb wobbled his head from side to side, like a broken spring, and hummed in response.

“How many digits can you memorise?” she asked, as a morbid curiosity twisted her features.

“Ah. Hm.” Caleb quickly bobbed his fingers on both hands up and down, counting under his breath for a few seconds. “Forty-two digits, for now. I am getting better though.”

She laughed. “You say that like forty-two isn’t impressive. You’ve got an amazing mind, Caleb.”

Caleb looked away, fixed his gaze on the path ahead. “I am very good at some things. Not so good at others.”

“What’re you not so good at? Name something.”

“Physical exercise,” he said, clutching his side theatrically and slowing his pace for a second. Veth laughed her loud cackling laugh, and Caleb found himself chuckling too. “I have never been too strong or fast,” he went on, “and I spend most of my days hunched behind a desk anyways, so I am sorry if I am slowing you down at all, Veth.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, I could move at twice this pace easy-peasy If I needed to, but I don’t mind this at all. I feel like I’ve been rushing through things lately. It’s nice to finally slow down.”

The trees thinned and thinner further until they were walking over snow and under the wide blue sky. Faint frilly strips of cloud arched overhead like giant snail-trails, and the sun hung low in the winter noon. Their path was marked by the odd post marked with a familiar shade of green paint sticking up from the snow, directing them onwards along the route when the path was no longer visible.

Caleb walked a few steps ahead of Veth to loosen the snow a little for her. He didn’t ask aloud but had already assumed that she would struggle to keep up otherwise at her height. She said nothing to counter his behaviour.

After a quarter mile of this similar terrain the hill flattened a little. Caleb could turn and see the peak of the mountain a couple miles to their west, so large and grim that his eyes struggled to focus and digest its immensity. He squinted up at it for a moment longer, dimly impressed by those who had the balls to actually climb it, before turning his attention onto the view to his north.

The valley stretched out before him like the beautiful little models he would see through the display windows of shops at home every year. His parents were always quite poor, never comfortable enough to decorate their home with the kinds of intricate beauties arranged behind those foggy shop windows, and Caleb was aware of it from an early age. So instead, he would watch the tiny wooden figures dance their clockwork dances, the tiny painted trains run along their tiny tracks, and stare at those impossibly elaborate tiny mountain towns celebrating their tiny Yule festivals, lit by lantern lights the size of pin heads, wondering if that was what perfection looked like.

Geneva was tiny from where Caleb stood on the side of the mountain. The road that cut through the snow, over the border, towards the alps was nothing more than a black shoelace curling over white carpet. The lake was a puddle. The hills that the laboratory sat near the feet of, which from his office windows looked immense, were modest little things, nothing more than a wrinkle in a rug.

Caleb took a deep breath in of clean, freezing cold air, listening to the blissful sound of nothing but the wind playing with his scarf and shaggy hair. And then remembered that he was not alone on the mountain.

He turned in time to see something hurtling towards his face. He flinched away and snowball caught him in the shoulder with a heavy _whupp_ that sent chunks of snow and ice over his face and neck.

“Oh shit!” yelled Veth, from somewhere. Caleb blinked snowflakes from his eyes but still could not see her in the field of white around him. “I guess I packed that one too tight. Sorry.”

A dark head popped up from the snow fifteen feet away. She must have ducked behind a snowbank, thought Caleb as he dusted the rest of the snowball out of his face and from the sleeve of his jacket. “It did not hurt me, it’s okay,” he said, wincing as he brushed a hand over a growing bruise on his upper arm. “You surprised me though.”

Veth hurried over to where he stood. “You’re supposed to throw one back at me now,” she reminded him as she clambered over a ridge of packed snow that lined the obscured hiking path.

He shook his head, smiling. “I will miss, I promise you. It would be embarrassing for us both.”

Veth was staring at the view now, knee-deep in snow and dusted up to her ears in melting ice. She blinked and said, without looking at Caleb, “This is the highest up anything I’ve ever been. Without a doubt.”

“Have your ears popped?”

“So that’s what that was, a mile ago? I thought my brain was about to pour out! Yes, my ears popped.”

Caleb chuckled. “We could rest here for a bit. Eat some of our food, drink water, take a breather. If you’ve had enough, we could turn around and begin heading back down too.”

Veth was quiet for a moment, looking out over the valley by his side, chewing her lip. She shuffled her feet and, looking like she was suddenly in pain, peered up at Caleb. “Can I ask you something?”

“If it is about hiking, I am afraid I cannot guarantee an answer; I do not know much about the hobby at all.”

“No, no, it’s…” She rubbed her gloved hands together and shifted her gaze from his face to the ground between them, then off to the side, then back to him. “I think I need your help.”

“Help with your pet project?” asked Caleb, suddenly hyper-engaged with the topic of conversation. He had been waiting for this all week. Whatever she was working on looked new, transgressive, complicated. He wanted to get his hands on it.

“Sort of,” she answered with an odd expression. “I’ve not lied to you, Caleb, since we met. Well, I might have lied to you a little, I’m not sure, but I have definitely hidden a lot of information from you.”

“Is this information that I should know?”

“Probably not. It’s the sort of information that’ll change a lot for you. If you even believe me.”

Caleb watched her chew her lip for a moment. “Why will I not believe you?” he asked.

“Because it won’t make any sense,” she grumbled, kicking at the snow, and sending a flurry up into the air. “It’ll sound like I’m making it up as a joke, or that I’m _crazy_. But I’m not crazy.” She fixed her eyes on his. “I’m not crazy, Caleb. I need your help.”

Caleb stared at her. She looked genuinely upset, scared even, as she was speaking to him. He didn’t have much experience comforting others or offering advice, but he found himself wanting to help her out of whatever was upsetting her so. He crouched a little awkwardly in front of her in the snowy path. “What can I do to help you, Veth?”

“First,” she began, taking a deep breath, “you need to listen to what I say and believe me. I’m not lying to you. It’s very important that you understand what I tell you next.” Caleb nodded slowly. “If you don’t believe me, I will do a thing or two to _make_ you believe me.”

“Well, that sounds a little ominous to me.”

“I’ll show you proof, that’s all.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Veth took another deep breath and squared her shoulders, staring Caleb straight in the eyes as she spoke. She looked frighteningly brave. “I am from a different world than yours. I am lost, afraid, alone, and desperate to go home, but I am trapped here. I do not understand how this world works. Where I am from, the land is different, languages are different, energy takes different forms and operates along different parameters. Even the people in my world are different. I don’t understand fully how I came here, and I don’t know how to get back.” Her voice wobbled a little as tears grew in her eyes. “I am so scared, Caleb, that I won’t see my family again if I can’t get back home.”

Several queries were running through Caleb’s mind as he listened to Veth; what makes her think that she is living in a different world? What are the different forms of energy that she is referring to? How did she travel between worlds? How does she plan to prove to him that she is telling the truth? Why did she not tell him about this theory before now?

But after Veth fell quiet Caleb only had one question on his tongue, to his own surprise.

“Why do you think that I could help you?”

She looked embarrassed. “Because you’re very smart, Caleb. You’re smarter than me. You’re way smarter than any of the other humans I’ve met here. I think you’re very kind too, even if you’re a little rough around the edges, no offence. Something tells me that you’ve got something I need.”

Caleb opened his mouth, then closed it. He cocked his head. “You called me a human.”

She looked even more embarrassed than before. “Uh, yeah. So—” She stopped herself and looked up at Caleb, suddenly her embarrassment was replaced by indignation. “Hang on! Do you actually believe what I’m saying?”

“I think I do.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you.”

He shrugged. “I do not know.”

“I’m talking total nonsense,” she cried, flinging up her hands. “I’m talking about alternate worlds and magic and—and portals and shit! You should be calling me crazy.”

“I have seen some crazy things lately. And you don’t seem like the kind of person to lie about something like this. You’re a terrible liar anyway.”

“That’s true.”

“So, I believe that you are telling me the truth,” he said carefully. “Which is what bothers me. It doesn’t make much sense.”

“You’re telling me,” she sighed. “I imagine how I feel.”

Caleb examined her for a moment. There were many holes in her story, some more sinister than others, but he though to start with the most glaringly obvious. “You called me a human a moment ago. Does that mean what I think it means, Veth.”

Veth swayed in place, grinning nervously. “Uh-huh. So, where I come from humans are…not a _minority_ exactly, but you guys aren’t quite as common as you are on this world. Maybe seventy to eighty percent of people in my world are…other kinds of people.”

“I would quite like for you to elaborate.”

“So, I’m disguising myself at the moment,” she said. When Caleb said nothing, just stared at her with a blank expression, she added, “with magic. I’m disguised with magic and have been since before you met me.”

Again, he said nothing. Caleb’s initial stunned curiously was beginning to give way to a resigned unhappiness. After a moment of silence Veth pulled one glove off. She lifted her bare hand and made an odd motion with her thumb and index in the air in front of her face, then snapped her fingers, then a faint pale-yellow shimmer rippled over her whole body.

Caleb blinked rapidly, feeling as if his eyes were not focused on the person standing Infront of him. Once Veth was no longer strange and blurry to him Caleb frowned; at first, there wasn’t much that appeared to have changed. But her ears were a little bigger and slightly pointed like a cat’s. She might have become even a little shorter than before and her dark brown eyes now shone with an inhuman sharpness, like those of an eagle or wolf. Her clothes were unchanged. She was watching Caleb’s reaction with the tightly coiled energy of a frightened animal.

“You know, I think I was expecting something different.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure. Fangs, claws, extra eyes. I was prepared to be horrified.”

Veth rubbed her eyes and shrugged. “Well, this is me. And you’ve just witnessed your very first magic trick.”

“Yes,” Caleb said thoughtfully. “And I suppose there is little room left for me to dismiss this as being only a product of my imagination or your madness.”

“No?”

“No. This is real. I believe it is all real.”

She brightened. “Oh, great! That’s great. I guess the next step for us would be for you to do some research, maybe look for records of something like this happening before. Other people and other portals, you know? And then we can put our heads together to find what actually caused me to be moved between worlds in the first place and we can maybe reverse-engineer that phenomena somehow to recr—hey, come back here!”

Veth hurried over the snow after Caleb, but he maintained his gait back down the path from whence they came. His breath clouded in the air around him as he ran.

The deep snow slowed him down by a margin and Veth would certainly be faster than him on most terrain by a long shot, but the knee-deep snow was oddly putting him at an advantage; while he was forced to lift his legs up comically high to maintain speed, Veth was practically wading through the snow behind him.

“Slow down!” she shouted at him, then cursed loudly, when Caleb assumed that she had slipped in the snow. “Come back, please!”

Caleb looked over his shoulder long enough to shout back, “I don’t want any part of this! I am sorry!”

Caleb was nearing the treeline. He’d made a significant head start but knew it would not last once they were both on solid ground, so picked up the pace even further until he was finally running between trees. His thighs burned, his nose and throat were numbed by the biting cold air, and he knew his endurance would give out quickly. It was beginning to dawn on him how futile his plan was. He’d hoped Veth would give up once she realised how little he wanted to do with the bizarre sort of events that had been following him lately and was now panicking.

Deep snow turned to light snow, then to frosty dirt track, and Caleb was hurtling down the path between the tall pines. He narrowly dodged a heavy branch and turned a slight corner fast enough to kick up a clump of frozen mud into.

From directly above came Veth’s voice. “Hold it right there!”

Veth silently dropped down to land before Caleb. He skidded to an ungraceful halt with a yelp. “Just listen, Caleb,” she pleaded. The ameliorating effect was lessened slightly by the dimly glowing crossbow-like contraption she now held in her hand and pointed squarely up at Caleb’s chest. “I genuinely believe you could help me. And I think that by doing so, by letting your knowledge of science and mine of magic meet, you might learn some things about your studies that you’d never discover otherwise. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

She paused to watch his reaction. Caleb only panted and grimaced. She may have been speaking to a proud and hungry part of his ego, but he was in control of himself.

“You were so interested in my pet project before. Aren’t you still?”

“Ja, of course. That was before I learned how dangerous it was.”

Veth groaned and let her head fall to the side, though her aim remained true and steady. “I am not asking you to go to war, I’m asking you to solve an equation. Aren’t you physicists meant to be good at that stuff?”

“Aren’t you one yourself?”

For a moment, Veth looked entirely baffled, before her expression cleared and she grinned. “Oh, right. I _did_ lie about that.”

Caleb gaped. “You don’t even work at CERN?”

“Of course not!”

“But you’ve been there for months! Those buildings are secured by the most advanced software and technology on the continent! How on earth were you—” He cut himself off. “Magic?”

She looked disgustingly proud of herself. Caleb felt lightheaded.

“I’ve found that you humans have a bad habit of not noticing me,” explained Veth airily, waving her glimmering crossbow-weapon between them. “Maybe because I’m small and quiet and quick. Maybe because I’m not from here and I’m a little…hmm, out-of-focus because of that. Anyway, I’m very good a sneaking around and have learned that if you act like you belong somewhere with enough confidence and don’t make a racket then people will pay you no mi—shit, not again!”

Caleb stumbled past Veth with a mumbled apology, pushing his way down the path and breaking into a run yet again. He wanted, and needed, desperately to be alone.

He only got three or so strides in before he was shoved sideways into the trunk of a pine tree. He cried at the pain suddenly radiating from his left wrist, which was pinned to the surface of the tree by a thin yellow membrane.

It looked like a dense spiderweb made of sherbet-lemon-yellow strands, gluing his left wrist and forearm securely to the tree trunk in a thick glob. But where it touched the slice of bare skin of his wrist exposed between his sleeve and glove the stuff was viciously searing his flesh like a strong acid. After only a second Caleb was gasping from the pain.

“Sorry, Caleb, I’m so sorry!” Veth was pointing a now-unloaded crossbow shakily at him. “I just need to you stay, please! Don’t leave me!”

But Caleb barely heard her. His heart was thrashing against his ribs as he stared at the web holding his wrist. The burning pain turned into a white blur at the edges of his vision and a buzz in his ears, drowning out any thought he might have entertained towards answering or speaking at all.

“I’ll let you go if you promise not to run away again. All I want is for some advice.”

A familiar hum sang in Caleb’s bones. His teeth ached, he tasted static, and for a moment reality seemed as malleable as numbers on a computer screen.

His heartrate remained frantic and his breathing remined shallow, and for all that he tried to understand what was truly happening this time around, he was still immensely frightened by the sensation of magic waking in his body. With a flash of gold and a graceful flurry of snowflakes and ginger hair, followed by an unexpected quiet _pop_ , Caleb was no longer restrained by Veth’s trap. Additionally, as Caleb discovered in the following moment, he was no longer Caleb.

A rather flustered peregrine falcon took off from where it had landed in a discombobulated pile of feathers and snow at the foot of the tree and shot up between the branches above the path, vanishing in the next moment almost without a noise.

The falcon remembered being Caleb Widogast. It remembered wanting to escape from the short woman and wanting to return to the base of the mountain. It was also somewhat aware of the strangeness of its situation, having been previously a thirty-three-year-old human and now a small bird of prey. It wasn’t feeling quite motivated enough to attempt to figure this mystery out though and was instead quickly distracted by a small furry creature half a mile away that was hiding in the rotting stump of a fallen tree.

Four minutes later the falcon returned to its task of flying to the foot of the mountain.

It found a wide black river where the mountain’s slope began to wane. _Road_ , a sensible voice in the falcon’s head supplied. It had found the road and was now diving down towards it.

The falcon landed by the road. It sunk far enough into the snow that it struggled to keep itself upright, and then suddenly it was no longer a falcon.

Caleb sat in the dirty snow next to the highway and considered vomiting. He felt as if he should, remembering the small mouse-like creature he had hunted just recently, but was stumped by the lack of substance when he dry-heaved onto the tarmac. Regardless, he had made it down from the mountain. For that, Caleb was somewhat proud of himself in the face of his terror, confusion, and brief time spent as a bird.

There were no signs of Veth in the vicinity. He doubted that she could easily catch up to him, even if by some miracle she was able to track him through the air.

As Caleb counted these blessings, he was alerted by the sound of an approaching vehicle. There was an elderly green car driving down the incline of the road. Caleb stood and put out a hand to hail the driver down and a moment later it slowed and drifted to his side of the otherwise empty mountain road.

Caleb patted his pockets as he watched the car slow to a halt. He was relived to find his possessions were where he had left them despite his flight, and kept a hand on his wallet, in case this driver was not the charitable sort.

The foggy window of the car was lowered in jerky motions as the diver wound their window crank, ducked down out of view as they did for a moment. As they cranked, Caleb said, “Hallo, I am sorry, but I became lost while taking a hike. Could you drop me off by the funicular or even take me to the border if—”

Caleb fell into silence once the driver’s face came into view.

“Oh. It’s you,” he said weakly.

“You!” spat Beauregard, pointing an accusatory finger through her open window.

Caleb said nothing more to her. He turned and began running away from the road, towards the trees, back up the side of the mountain.

* * *

Beau spent no time wondering what _that man_ was doing on the side of the road covered in snow and mud. She was out of her car and running after him only a second after he took off. However, he made it to the treeline before her and although she was confident that she could have outpaced that waif blindfolded, she was soon struggling to keep an eye on him through the walls of dense monochrome trees.

“Widogast!” she called after him. Her voice bounced around the forest like a gunshot. “What have you done this time!”

“Nothing!” his voice cried back from somewhere ahead of her.

“Then why’re you running from me, you bastard!”

“I have had a very bad day, and I– _oof_!”

His words were cut off by the unmistakable sound of somebody falling face first into a snowdrift. Beau slowed her pace for a moment before cautiously approaching the source of his muffled groans of pain.

In the centre of a small clearing among the pines the man named Caleb Widogast lay on his stomach in the snow. There was a deep trench left in the snow behind him that indicated he had slid for some distance before coming to a stop, a fair amount of snow piled onto his head and shoulders, and a short and unfamiliar woman standing triumphantly on the small of his back holding a crossbow.

This woman turned to look at Beau, lowered her weapon, and said, “Who are you?”

“Who the fuck are you?” asked Beau in response.

Caleb weakly lifted his head out from the snowbank. “I don’t want to be here.”

It was then that Beau noticed the unusual glow emanating from the tip of the woman’s crossbow and the alien features of her face. She was by no means entirely _inhuman_ , but there was enough odd about her to make Beau look a little closer.

The woman appeared to notice Beau’s attention and stiffened. She hopped down from Caleb’s back, making him wheeze, raised a hand, said something strange, and in the next moment her appearance changed to that of an unremarkable person. “What’re you lookin’ at,” she said flatly.

“I saw you do that,” said Beau.

“Do what?”

Beau stared blankly at the woman. “You’re not human.”

“Yes I am.”

“You are a terrible liar, Veth,” said Caleb, who remained on the ground but had rolled over onto his back. He avoided making eye contact with Beau. “I think it is fair to say that your cover has been blown.”

“And your crossbow is magic,” Beau stated, pointing at the thing still held in the hand of the person called Veth. “It’s glowing.”

Veth crossed her arms and scowled. “And why aren’t _you_ freaking out about it, huh?”

Beau shrugged. “Been seeing some weird shit lately. This is pretty tame in comparison.”

At that, Caleb barked out a miserable laugh and got to his knees. He sneered at Veth. “There you have it. Someone who’s almost as crazy as I am. You can ask _her_ to help you.”

“Why would I want her help? I don’t even know her.”

Beau felt somewhat affronted by the rejection. “Help with what?”

Veth ignored her and spoke again to Caleb, gesturing emphatically with one empty hand and one crossbow. “I genuinely believe that if we work together, we could figure out what’s happening to both of us. We could find a way to bring me home. I know that you’re scared, Caleb, I do, and I wish that I could explain what it is that’s happening to you, but I don’t fully understand it either. But if we maybe work together—”

“Absolutely not. I will not let you drag me any further into this madness.”

“I am offering to drag you _out_!”

“And what could I possibly offer you? Hm? I am a walking calculator. I have the upper body strength of a toddler. I speak five languages, and not even one allows me to—to…to tear apart space and time. I am not a magician! I am just a coward who wants to go home.”

“You’re not useless, Caleb!”

“I am entirely useless to you! Utterly!”

“You have control over real magic!”

“I do not!”

“You turned into a bird!”

Beau blinked at Caleb. “You turned into a bird?”

Caleb threw his hands up and tossed his head about in frustration. “By _accident_ ,” he hissed at them both.

The scene that Beau had stumbled onto made very little sense to her, but she was quickly putting it together. She had always been sharp, for better or for worse, and had already pieced together a thin and flimsy context to this bizarre argument. As of now, she had no way of connecting the tarp-monster she had encountered the night before to these two characters, but she had the nagging feeling that they were not entirely unrelated.

If she had the time, she would have sat down in the city library and began piecing the mystery together through intensive research and investigation, how she had learned to. But she had no time for that. Her two best leads were bickering right before her in the middle of the alpine woods. She had to act now.

Beau stepped between the two of them – stranger and near-stranger – and put a warning hand up towards each of their faces, flat palm out. Luckily, Caleb had already seen her in action and Veth seemed to be smart enough to pick up the message: behave or I break your noses.

“I think the three of us should talk,” said Beau.

“We are talking,” answered Veth. The strange crossbow hung dormant at her hip, still humming faintly with that unnerving yellow energy.

“I mean somewhere that isn’t in the middle of the woods where it’s as cold as Satan’s balls. My car is sitting on the road just back there—” she jerked her head to illustrate, “—and I could drive you guys somewhere warmer to talk about our…situation.”

“ _Our?_ ” echoed Veth.

“Yes. Because I think the shit I’ve seen and the shit you’re dealing with, and the shit that you…” She trailed off as she glanced over at Caleb. He avoided her gaze again, almost folding in on himself where he stood hunched in the snow. “…your shit…I think it’s all connected. I want to make sense of it. And for that, I need your help.”

“My help?” Veth parroted her again. She looked entirely taken back by the suggestion.

“Yes. And yours,” said Beau, pointing at the miserable Caleb.

“You will not let me go, will you?” he asked sullenly.

“Nope.”

Caleb sighed and trudged across the clearing. As he passed her, his grimace turned into a pained grin. “You are like a bad penny, Beauregard.”

“Same to you, Widogast.”

He went on his way down the mountainside, following their footprints that lead back to the highway. Beau chewed her lip and turned to follow him.

After a moment she heard Veth following her, a pair of light footsteps crunching through the young snow and nimbly hopping over the odd snowbank or fallen branch. The woman caught up to her and gave her an appraising stare for a moment as they walked side-by-side through the trees.

“You know Caleb?”

Beau nodded and gave her a brittle smile. “This son of a bitch owes me eight hundred francs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caleb's terrible, awful, no good, very bad hike.


	4. all that the proud can feel of pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This week's chapter is dialogue-heavy, but it's exposition which has been a long time coming. 
> 
> Factoid Corner: 800 francs is equal to roughly 150 US dollars or 100 UK pounds these days by my unreliable research and calculations. In last week's chapter and in this one the characters are using the new French franc which passed out of use around 2000, rather than the Swiss franc which is still used today. During this period in Geneva and the surrounding region people were carrying both types of franc in their wallets due to its proximity to the border.

The man named Caleb Widogast looked almost exactly like how Beau remembered him when they had first met, although perhaps even scruffier.

She watched him where he sat in the backseat of her car through the interior mirror. His hair was longer. He may not have cut it since they’d met ten months ago. Now he wore it in a loose ponytail of copper-orange hair that fell over his pasty freckled face and large plastic-rimmed glasses which frankly belonged to the previous decade. He’d shed the snow jacket and awkwardly folded it over his knees, revealing a shapeless beige cardigan spotted by coffee stains.

Veth, on the other hand, was pretty, for an alien. Beau still wasn’t entirely sure what Veth was but was confident she was not human and nor of this world. The illusion she had created in the woods hid her pointed ears but changed nothing else, as far as Beau could tell. A necklace made from small shiny trinkets hung around her neck and disappeared under the collar of her heavy fleece.

The two passengers stared out opposite windows in unhappy silence for the first few miles of their journey. Beau had at first offered to take them back up the mountain to the chalet, but both had preferred returning to Geneva. Beau had acquiesced, thinking she could find a nice hostel afterward.

But the air in the car became heavy and awkward shortly after that discussion died down. Veth seemed shy, but Caleb’s silence was one of miserable reluctance.

About five miles from the border Beau decided to begin the inevitable conversation early and bit the bullet.

“So, Veth,” she began, trying in vain to meet the woman’s eyes in the mirror, “care to fill me in on your story?”

Veth spared a glance Beau’s way before resuming her stare at the passing trees, cheek in her palm. “I’m from another world. A portal brought me here against my will.” She seemed to paus for Beau’s reaction, but when nothing came – no disbelief, laughter, or even a flinch of surprise – Veth sighed and spoke again. “About a year ago I fell into a river outside my village. I was being chased by a band of goblins. I had tried to run over the river, which was partially frozen at the time, to escape and outrun them but the ice broke under me and I fell in. I thought I was drowning, but when I woke up again, I wasn’t dead. I was laying on the banks of a different river.”

Judging by the subtle expression on Caleb’s face where he sat next to Veth, he hadn’t heard the whole of this story either.

“I didn’t know where I was,” she went on. “I walked through the woods until I found a little wooden house and I thought…well, I thought I was just lost and was somewhere else in the valley. But when I looked through the window, I saw things that didn’t make any sense to me. I saw humans, who I’ve seen before, but they were dressed weird and held strange devices and talked about stuff that I didn’t understand at all.”

“You don’t have phones where you come from?”

“No. No phones, televisions, cars. I think my world is little like yours was four hundred years or so ago, but we have magic. You guys spent four hundred years inventing the LED, we spent those centuries learning how to throw fire out of our fingers.”

“You can do that?” Caleb spoke for the first time in fifteen miles.

Veth shook her head; Caleb looked a little disappointed. “Not me. But I can do a little magic. You’ve seen some of it already. I’m good at tricking people. I can change how I look and make small things float and turn invisible for a short time, oh, and I can make my crossbow shoot some weird stuff.”

“I noticed,” said Caleb. He rubbed at one of his wrists and frowned out the window. The countryside had given way to townscape, the beginning of Geneva’s spillage into France.

“So, I knew I had travelled between worlds, although I didn’t know how or why. I tried going back to the river. I tried jumping in to find the rift that I fell through. I searched for hours but found nothing. I almost drowned a second time.” She drew into herself. “I’m not good at solving big problems like this. I’m not a mage or an archivist, I’m just the wife of a chemist from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.” Veth’s voice became thin. She pressed her lips together as her shoulders began shaking. “I don’t know what to do. Yeza and Luc are all alone in Felderwin without me—they probably think I died that night.”

Beau’s chest stung with an unfamiliar sympathy. She tried not to pay any mind to it and turned her attention to Caleb.

“Veth said you turned into a bird,” she stated.

Caleb glowered at her from under his red hair. “I cannot understand how you believe any of what we are saying, Beauregard.”

“Just answer the damn question.”

“ _Ja_. I turned into a bird.”

“It was _very_ impressive,” added Veth eagerly. Her eyes still shone with anxious tears, but she now wore a thin smile plastered over her sadness.

“It was an accident,” he said. “I just wanted to escape from you quickly and safely and then…ah, it is hard to explain, but it made sense to me in the moment. It felt like I had gleaned the solution to an equation, and by solving it I could manipulate…like I could mould reality, just a little bit. But now the equation seems strange and indecipherable again.”

Veth was looking directly at Caleb now. “You were using much more powerful magic than I can, Caleb. That proves you’re _very_ talented.”

He didn’t answer.

“Can you do it again?” asked Beau, overcome with curiosity. “Can you turn into other stuff?”

“Do not mock me, Beauregard. No. I cannot do it again. I do not know how I did it the first time.”

“Maybe you just need practice,” suggested Veth, “like with learning anything else. I didn’t know any physics at all when I first arrived here, but it turns out it’s not too different from alchemy. It’s all about understanding how matter is made, broken down, and changed into other matter. I got the hang of it quick enough. And you’re much more intelligent than me.”

Caleb met Veth’s gaze. His expression had softened. “I wish I could be of use to you, Veth, but I am not the kind of person you want to rely upon. You would do better to work with Beauregard. She is irritable and abrasive, yes, but she is clever. And unlike me she is reckless enough to run face-first into this strange mess.”

Veth and Beau made eye contact in the interior mirror for a heartbeat. Veth’s eyes narrowed. “She scares me.”

Beau rolled her eyes. “Man, and I was trying so hard to be cordial to you guys.”

The familiar concrete field and series of inspections gates that marked the crossing from France into Switzerland came into sight. Beau shut her mouth in favour of reaching into the glovebox for her passport as Caleb and Veth both shuffled to attention behind her.

The roads were blissfully free and many of the gates were unoccupied as she arrived. Beau drove up to the first free inspection gate. She rolled down her window to greet the tired woman in the booth in polite French, familiar with the routine, and handed over her identity papers. The woman asked for the passport of the man in the backseat. Beau twisted around to take Caleb’s passport and found that the seat next to him was empty; Veth was gone. Beau kept her face blank and said nothing of it as the border patrol woman checked her and Caleb’s papers.

Once the routine was complete Beau drove under the gate and into Switzerland, and into Geneva proper. An audible breath of relief was released from Caleb in the backseat.

“You are a tricky one, Veth,” he said under his breath. He was weakly smiling.

Veth suddenly popped back into view in her seat, like a lightbulb, beaming with pride. “I learned that spell pretty recently. It’s come in very handy helping me sneak into your workplace.”

The smile vanished from Caleb’s face.

“How do you know Caleb?” Veth asked Beau suddenly.

Beau’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel as Caleb turned away towards the window again. She sighed. “How about you ask him.”

“My account will not provide much of an explanation,” said Caleb. “I was a little drunk at the time.”

“No excuse,” grumbled Beau. “I was drunk as shit that night and wasn’t half as stupid as you were.”

Veth was looking between the two of them with an intense curiosity. She pointed hesitantly at Beau. “A lovers’ quarrel?”

Both Beau and Caleb balked. Beau swerved slightly on the road, just narrowly missing the curb, and swore loudly. Caleb sounded like he’d choked.

“No! Not that, not that at all. No,” insisted Beau. The brief mental image Veth had conjured wobbled mockingly in her mind’s eye for a second before Beau refocussed. She laughed dryly. “He’s not my type.”

Caleb cleared his throat and winced. “And I assure you, Veth, I do not have time for those kinds of things anyways.”

“Oh.” Veth crossed her arms, thoughtful. “It just seemed to me like a very dramatic grudge, so my imagination got carried away. Sorry for assuming.”

“Not dramatic, just embarrassing,” said Caleb.

“Humiliating,” corrected Beau, sending a glare at Caleb in the mirror.

“You are rather building up the anticipation now, Beauregard. We might as well fill our friend in on what happened.” Caleb stared at Beau’s reflection, fixing her with one of his weird miserable glares. Her skin began to crawl.

“You say that like I was the one in the wrong.”

“Let us just tell the story, Beauregard.”

* * *

Caleb didn’t even like drinking that much; he hated the inevitable headaches and embarrassment, knowing how easily his awfully weak body drowned in Swiss beer, and he had no friends in this country to enjoy the habit with. After almost five years he had only visited bars with some apathetic co-workers and always left alone and dizzy. The noise and smells irritated him, the people were boring, he would rather spend his weekend nights alone with his books.

This was one of those unfortunate nights that somebody had dragged him into the city on the hunt for cheap alcohol. One of the younger men, an Englishman named Mike or Martin or Matt, Caleb hadn’t cared enough to ask, had chosen a small pub-like establishment that sat in the basement of a small brown-brick building. It was quiet and traditional and half-empty. There was a radio burbling somewhere in the back of the room, and the few patrons already sitting in their booths and at their stools were either silent or quietly playing card games amongst themselves.

His co-workers bustled over to the bar and began talking while waiting for their drinks. Caleb pretended to listen for a while; his conversational interests did not extend far past particle physics, classical history, and cats. So, his co-workers’ discussion of sports may as well have been in Greek for all Caleb could understand of it.

Caleb wondered how long it would take for him to learn Greek, as he thanked the barman for his drink. It had taken him all of four months to become fluent in Italian. Perhaps he could revisit the idea that summer.

As he thought this, his eyes fell on one of the booths across the bar. Three people were playing some variety of poker on the little circular table between them. A dark-skinned young woman was winning; she had a modest pile of money between her wrists and sat with an air of complete comfort despite her blank expression. The two men she was playing against looked somewhat less happy.

He watched for a while. Perhaps without noticing he began keeping count of the exchange of cards. He wasn’t familiar with the game but quickly picked up the gist of the rules, and with it, an equation.

As he sipped his beer Caleb idly calculated the likelihood of the older man drawing either the ace or queen of spades from the young woman. Once he grew bored with that, he estimated the hand the woman currently held. A minute later he was proven wrong; he adjusted the equation, corrected the parameters, and waited for his next piece of data.

The woman was currently holding four cards. Caleb was a little over ninety-eight percent certain she held the king of hearts, the king of clubs, the king of spades, and a joker.

He watched as she laid her cards down face-up on the table and grinned at her opponents; he had been right.

Caleb finished his beer and walked over to the booth. He was riding a rare wave of confidence and felt the unfamiliar desire to prove himself. As he came closer the woman looked up, busy collecting her winnings from two unhappy gentlemen.

“Can I help you.” Her voice was pitched low and severely unwelcoming. Caleb pushed through it.

“May I play?”

The woman, who spoke with an American accent, leant back in her seat, and examined Caleb. This was where he was at least rightfully confident. He knew how he looked: like a skinny scruffy nerd. He was the antonym for intimidating.

After a moment, the woman flashed a smile and nodded to an empty seat opposite her, which had just been vacated by one of the losers.

Caleb sat down. He was wordlessly dealt a hand by the other man. They began playing without any explanation of the rules, how the betting worked, or even polite introductions. Caleb supposed it was fair, given how he had barged in on their game uninvited anyway.

The first round went well. Caleb had guessed the rules correctly and was keeping up with his fellow players. He kept his card-counting to a minimum for the time being but kept track of his parameters just in case and refined the equation further.

After the first round he had won almost fifty francs from the man. The woman had won considerably more from the same guy. The poor fellow was red in the face, sweating, possibly already drunk, and muttering in foul Swiss German under his breath by the end of it. The woman watched with a cruel grin as he flung down his losing cards, grabbed his coat from the back of his chair, and stormed out of the bar without another word.

The woman whistled. “Sore loser.”

“Is that the end?” asked Caleb. He began sorting the pennies into a neat pile in front of him.

“I’m game for more if you are,” the woman said, meeting his eyes with a worrying intensity.

Perhaps it was the bliss from winning any money at all, perhaps it was the pleasure of testing and perfecting his formula, or perhaps it was the alcohol already in his system, but Caleb felt no less than eager to give into the woman’s taunts. He nodded and took his hands away from his winnings.

She grinned even wider and put out a hand. “Beauregard Lionett,” she said. Caleb gave her offered hand a brief shake.

“Caleb Widogast.”

“Good to meet you, Caleb Widogast. Let’s play.”

Beauregard began playing differently almost at once. She raised the stakes higher and more frequently, forcing Caleb to open his wallet with an uncomfortable regularity. She also played reckless. Caleb guessed that she had assumed rightly he had never played before and was making use of tactics he was unfamiliar with. Her confidence rolled off her in heavy stinking waves.

But what Beau did not know was that Caleb was in control. He saw every move before she took them. He weighed the risk of each ante to the eighth decimal place, calculating the likelihood of failure each time in under two seconds. But he never let his thoughts show on his face. His expression remained as dour and unremarkable as ever, as he liked it.

And soon Caleb began winning. The small pile of cash between his elbows turned into a large pile of cash, and Beau began to scowl on her side of the table.

He had taken over a hundred francs from her. He expected her to fold soon and quit, but she held fast, to his displeasure. Caleb was happy she had not noticed his card counting yet but knew his luck would thin the longer they played. Unfortunately, Beauregard proved to be monstrously stubborn and wanted to win back her money regardless of the odds stacked against her.

After almost an hour of playing the rest of the bar had faded away. He and Beauregard sat at a table in nowhere. There was nothing else to see and hear around them, and Caleb had forgotten who he had even come here with. He had even stopped caring about the money. Beauregard was no longer playing reckless; she had suddenly become frighteningly smart. Now, she was ferocious and tactical, possibly even trying to calculate his hand in return, and was gaining back a small amount of advantage from him.

Caleb was somewhat bitter for having been deprived of this intelligent and ruthless of an opponent until so late in the game.

But still, Caleb was winning. He had somewhere between five and seven hundred francs sitting on his side of the table. He was dimly aware that this was an absurd amount of money for one person to be carrying to a bar on a Saturday night, but had no time to think too hard about it. Beauregard was currently glaring ice-blue daggers at him over her hand of cards.

“Are you cheating, you son of a bitch?”

Caleb picked up a new card without breaking her gaze – it would be the seven of diamonds – and shrugged one shoulder. “How would I be cheating, Beauregard?” He looked back at his hand and smiled inwardly; he had picked up the seven of diamonds.

“I’m not sure yet, but I know you are,” she hissed. “I’ll figure it out. Just give me time.”

“How much more time? How much money do you have left?” Caleb knew that prodding her bruised ego would not be good for his health but was eager for her to throw in the towel before his cover could be blown.

“Enough,” she answered through gritted teeth.

Caleb had stopped counting how much money he was winning. It was a lot, that was all he needed to know, and his head was beginning to hurt. He regretted the beer. He regretted asking to play. He regretted agreeing to come to this bar in the first place. He wanted to be home.

The woman across the table, on the other hand, had become eerily quiet. She was no longer bouncing her leg anxiously or sending death-glares at him, although she was still steadily haemorrhaging cash. Instead, she was keeping a very close eye on Caleb’s hands and eyes.

After another quiet round, Beauregard abruptly leapt forwards and slapped Caleb’s card from his grip. He yelped in surprise, and she barked out a humourless laugh.

“You _are_ cheating! You’re fucking counting the fucking cards!”

“I am not,” he lied.

“You are! I’m gonna kick your skinny ass, Widogast.”

Caleb felt faint. He wasn’t sure what to do. He began quietly scooping his winnings away into his wallet.

“German bastard. I should have known you were slimy.”

Caleb kept his eyes averted from Beauregard as he tucked his now very fat wallet away and stood up from the table. “I am sorry, Beauregard. I followed the rules. You wanted to play me again. I am sorry.”

A hand closed over his shoulder before he could take more than one step away from the booth. “Oh, I don’t think you’re walking away from me,” Beauregard said sweetly into his ear. “You’re going to give me back my money. Because you fucking cheated.”

“You did not see me cheat.”

“No,” she agreed. “I didn’t. But the chances of you picking up those cards every single time just does _not_ add up, buddy. It’s a statistical miracle. You would have had to have known exactly what cards were in what pool on that table every single time, even after I’d picked up my cards, to be quite so lucky.”

Caleb was sweating heavily. The man behind the bar, who had paused his business to watch the two of them across the room, narrowed his eyes in warning.

The hand on his shoulder felt like lead – like _hot_ lead. Beauregard was dressed in a comfortable knitted pullover, cable-knit and bulky, but she had rolled the sleeves up to play and Caleb had just spent two hours faced with her frightening muscle definition. He began quickly calculating the chances of escaping this bar with all his teeth.

“You’re going to give me back my money, Widogast,” she went on, “Or we are going to have a problem.”

He suspected that they would have a problem either way, judging by her current temperament. The only difference would be the amount of blood staining her francs by the end of the night.

And besides, Caleb wanted to keep the money. It was expensive living in the middle of Geneva on a physicist’s wage and the research funds from his university back in the Republic were beginning to dribble away. Eight hundred francs could fix the faulty boiler in his apartment. Eight hundred could buy him a new pair of shoes. Perhaps sober-Caleb would have felt differently about the issue at hand, but somewhat-drunk-Caleb wanted to keep the money.

Somewhat-drunk-Caleb pulled himself free from Beau’s loose grasp and made a break for it towards the front of the bar.

“Shit!” Beauregard scrambled after him.

Caleb was within arm’s reach of the door when Beau dodged into view and blocked his path; she was quick. Caleb skidded to a halt and began running in the opposite direction, his eyes wide and heart pounding.

The last few patrons in the bar watched them with slack jaws. The bartender shouted in furious French, but Caleb was too panicked to listen.

He slammed bodily into the door to the men’s room. It was the only other door in sight. He stumbled inside and panted, searching for a place to hide. There were two cubicles. He slid into one and locked the plastic door shut.

A moment later the door to the men’s room slammed open. A pair of slow footstep followed.

“I’m gonna get that money back one way or the other,” said Beau’s voice. “Let’s get this over with.”

Caleb looked around himself: a grimy toilet, a bald cardboard tube, a narrow and closed window close to the ceiling. He grunted and climbed up onto the toilet lid and began working on the latch.

Three thuds sounded against the locked cubicle door. “Fucking coward!”

Caleb pushed the little letterbox-shaped window open. Cold night air kissed his burning face as he pressed himself to it, judging it to be just wide enough to fit through, and quickly searched the street outside for onlookers. The window opened onto a gutter. The street outside looked empty. Caleb began crawling to freedom.

The pounds had transitioned to heavy kicks. Beau had fallen into a quiet focus as she lay siege against the plastic door of the toilet cubicle.

Meanwhile, Caleb wriggled his way out into the street. He spared no time to examine how much muck and gutter water had stained his clothing before getting to his feet and running as hard as he could down the road away from the bar. He no longer heard Beau’s yelling, nor her attempts to break down the door. His mind became blissfully empty as he ran home.

* * *

Veth was quiet for a while. She slowly stirred her hot chocolate, frowning into space as Caleb and Beau sat opposite, waiting for her to break the uncomfortable silence.

“So…” Veth finally said, “This feud between you two is all about a card game from a year ago.”

Caleb winced. “Well, when you put it like that…”

Beau was no more pleased by the retelling. The parts that Caleb had filled in only painted her as more of a brutish simpleton than she might have already come off as. She seethed and drank her coffee.

She had taken them to a pleasant café in the city centre after parking her car a ten-minute walk away. The place smelled strongly of powdered chocolate and strawberry jam. Veth was enjoying a slice of sponge cake. Caleb had ordered nothing.

“What did you even do with my money?” asked Beau.

“What you’re meant to do with money,” he said. “I spent it.”

“On what.”

Caleb looked at her. He was hard to read, in the same way that it is hard to tell what a marble statue is thinking. “Necessary things.”

She felt no great inclination to prod further.

Veth spoke up. “Well, if nothing else it proves that you’re a very smart man, Caleb. That sounded like a very complicated card game that you managed to unravel just inside your head, _and_ while drunk. It’s very impressive.”

“A genius and a bastard,” Beau said into her mug.

“You talk yourself down, but you have a lot of talent,” Veth went on. “Didn’t you say earlier today that you can memorise a number to forty decimal places?”

“Forty-two,” he corrected.

Beau started. “Hold on, he can do what?”

Veth grinned and sat up straighter in her seat. “Hey, Caleb. Close your eyes for me.”

For whatever reason, he humoured her and diligently shut his eyes.

Veth glanced quickly around the café and chewed her lip then, after a moment, asked Caleb, “Tell me, how many people in here are wearing glasses right now?”

“Including me, five.”

“Men?”

“Including me, two.”

“How many women are eating cake in this café?”

“Including you, Veth, there are three.”

“How many dresses are displayed in the clothing shop across the street?”

“Four.”

Beau was struggling to keep up with the exchange. From what she could gather, jerking her head left and right to check, he was answering every question accurately, but she couldn’t believe it.

“How many piercings are there in Beauregard’s left ear?”

“Four. One of them is inflamed. She should see a pharmacist about it.”

Beau slapped a hand to her ear and gaped at Caleb. His eyes were still closed. “How are you doing that?”

He opened his eyes. “I pay attention. And I forget nothing.”

“You have a photographic memory?”

“People have called it that. It is less like a photo camera and more like a camcorder if you were to ask me.”

“Sweet,” Beau said dryly. “A human super 8. This’ll come in so handy when I get attacked by another nightmare monster.”

Veth pointed her cake fork at Beau accusingly. “Speaking of, is it your turn to explain your weird shit? I spilled my soul in the car ride over here and I still don’t understand why you want my help.”

“I got attacked by a nightmare monster last night.” Beau took a long sip of her coffee.

“That explains nothing.”

“I don’t have much more to tell you. I don’t know what it was, I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t know where it came from. It was there when I got home from work and it attacked me.”

“Do you have injuries?” asked Caleb. He was gripping his forearms rather tightly; Beau eyed his body language before answering slowly.

“No. I ran away from it.”

“What did it look like?” Veth asked her. She was leaning over the table now, eyes wide with interest.

“Uh. Kinda like a big piece of tarp. But it didn’t move like a piece of fabric being blown about by the wind. It moved like an insect, all jerky and angular. And it made a noise like a…like wheezing. It was a sort of greyish green colour like old meat.” She met Veth’s gaze. “Have you seen something like that before?”

Veth thought for a moment. “No. I’ve never really fought monsters before at all, besides the odd goblin. But…” She rubbed a thumb over her lower lip. Caleb was watching her too, still idly scratching at his forearms. “I might have heard of something like that before,” Veth said finally.

“Really?”

“Not in detail. It’s the sort of thing you might find in the wastes in the east. There’re all kinds of weird things over there, that’s why it’s so dangerous to cross the border.” She frowned. “But it’s definitely not the kind of thing you would find around Felderwin.”

“So, it came through a different portal than you one you fell through?” Beau’s mind started racing.

“Probably.”

Caleb tapped his fingernails against the table. “This…if you are right, Beauregard, then this is already out of our control. There is probably nothing we can do about it. Veth arrived in this world over a year ago. That monster appeared last night, yes? This is not a new phenomenon.”

“Where was the river you woke up by, Veth?” Beau asked, ignoring him.

“Oh, north of here. In the park hills.”

Beau chewed her thumbnail. “A dozen miles away from my cabin…on the other side of the valley…”

“Beauregard—” Caleb began, before Beau held up both hands to shut him up.

“I think I met somebody else from another world earlier this week.”

“What?”

“A woman named Yasha.” She met Veth’s eye as she said it.

Veth looked offended. “We don’t all know each other.”

“She turned up at the chalet I work at early this week, the day after the thunderstorm. She told me that she was lost. But when talked to her…I got this feeling that she was more than lost. She talked like she didn’t even know what continent she was on, let alone country. Plus, she was dressed super weird.”

“Did you ask her if she fell in a river too?”

“No. I gave her a map though. She seemed happy about it and then ran off again.”

“Oh. Your turn Caleb,” said Veth, apparently having lost interest in Beau’s story.

Caleb looked uncomfortable with both women staring at him and shrunk into his seat by a fraction. He cleared his throat. “As you have seen, Veth, I am apparently capable of manifesting unnatural phenomena. I accidentally turned into a bird earlier.”

“It was very impressive.”

“If you say so. Last night I may have accidentally turned some fruit into a pile of buttons.”

“I’m seeing a pattern emerging here,” Beau said with a grin. “You like turning one thing into another? Can you pull a rabbit out of a hat?”

Caleb scowled at her. He went on, “I have also seen some floating lights around my workplace.”

“Your workplace?”

“CERN. I am a particle physicist.”

Beau groaned. “God, you’re a nerd.”

“Will you let me finish without insulting me further.”

“I guess.”

“I have seen floating lights around the laboratory this week. It started on Tuesday. I saw one in a computer lab in the early morning. They are small, like little purple fireflies. It disappeared after I disconnected a device which was sounding an alarm nearby.”

Veth perked up. “What did the device look like?”

“Sort of like a fire alarm. But it was plugged into the computer banks and appeared to be monitoring something.”

Veth now looked very guilty. She spun her cake fork between her fingers and smiled sweetly. “Yeah, so I put that there.”

“You?” Caleb blinked rapidly at Veth. “Did you make it? What does it do? Why was it making that noise?”

She smiled a little wider. “I did make it. It’s made from old telephone parts and bit of computers from your lab. I’m rather proud of it.” She didn’t seem to notice how Caleb paled when she mentioned the cannibalisation of his computers. “It’s supposed to detect when other portals open up nearby, but I don’t think it works. I had left it active for months and it picked up nothing.”

“But it detected something that night.”

“Maybe.” Veth shrugged. “Maybe it was just detecting _your_ magic, Caleb. I don’t have much experience making magical devices, so it’s pretty unlikely this one is accurate.”

He frowned at her, tipping his head forward so she was forced to meet his eyes. “It detected something, Veth, the very same night that I saw those floating lights for the first time. The same night as the thunderstorm,” he said, shooting a glance at Beau. “We do not have all the pieces of this puzzle yet, but I believe the outline is coming together.”

Beau chuckled. “Sounds like you’re a little interested by this portal business afterall, Widogast.”

“I am curious, I must admit. I tried to interact with one of the purple lights once and…well, nothing good happened, but what I got a glimpse of has been on my mind. It scares me. I am afraid of this mystery as much as I am interested in it.” He took a deep breath. “But I cannot ignore it. It is following me like a curse. I would like to escape that curse if it is possible.”

“And help Veth?”

Caleb turned a foul glare onto Beau. “Yes. And help Veth any way that I can.” He looked back at Veth. “But I cannot promise that I will be facing any nightmare monsters in the process.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Veth assured him, patting the back of his hand. “I’m not excited to see one of those things either.”

“And maybe you can learn how to use your freaky magic to help us,” said Beau, slapping him on the back and making him wheeze. “Turn into an even bigger bird. Summon a portal yourself.”

“All my magic has been accidental and confusing so far; might I remind you Beauregard.”

“For now.”

“While I was a bird, I was very stupid. I almost forgot what I was doing. I lost all of my intellect.”

“We can work with that.”

“I think I ate a mouse.”

“What a team we are,” Beau said with her arms flung out wide, pointedly ignoring Caleb’s expression. “Three assholes trying to solve a supernatural mystery together. It’s like the first act of a Spielberg movie.”

“We should have a group name,” suggested Veth.

“I think we should simply start by deciding what our plan is,” Caleb said. “We have many leads, but all are rather cold.”

“We could start by finding that monster. It might still be lurking around Beau’s place.”

Beau nodded, knitting her fingers under her chin. She had driven past her cabin that morning, only examining the driveway and what of the treeline she could see from her car’s window but had seen nothing. There was no sign of the creature waiting for her on the road or on her porch like last night but then again, she hadn’t taken to time to fully investigate the scene of the crime, so to speak. Uncertainty needled at her mind like a thorn in her side.

“You’re right,” she said, “I should go back there and take a look. I don’t like it, it freaked me out enough last night, but it would be nice to have backup this time around. You good to go hunting with me, Veth?”

“Absolutely. This is the best lead I’ve had in a whole year. Plus, I’m a very good shot.” She nodded at the bag by her feet, where she had tucked away her strange crossbow-like device before the car trip. “I’m also not half-bad at tracking stuff. And if you need a lock unpicked, I’m your gal,” she said with a toothy grin.

Caleb shrugged. “So long as you do not ask me to come with you on this particular monster hunting trip, I will be happy to help.” He paused as a strange look came over his face. “Once I figure out exactly how I can help you two,” he added. “Once I have a grip on this magic.”

They decided to investigate her cabin the following Friday, so long as nothing else jumped out from the shadows at them before then. Shortly after this they learnt that Veth had no place to stay.

The news shocked Caleb, less so by surprise and more so by basic principle; he appeared to have a severe amount of sympathy for her situation. Beau offered the sofa in her cabin as soon as it was declared monster-free, but Caleb insisted she stay in his city apartment effective immediately. Veth seemed pleased by this offer. But when Beau asked Veth where she had been sleeping for the past year, she was evasive. It seemed to Beau that this was the Veth’s first night under a human roof.

Having finished their drinks and cakes and leaving the café, Caleb handed Beau a napkin with his apartment’s phone number scrawled onto it with red pen.

“My cabin doesn’t have landline,” she explained, staring at the red numbers. The guy had weirdly elegant handwriting. “There’s an emergency phone half a mile from my cabin – for breakdowns and avalanches, you know – but I’ll probably have to call you from my car phone.”

“That’s alright,” he said, folding his scarf back around his neck and shoulders. Veth was busy tugging her gloves on. “Does this mean you have forgiven me?"

"For conning me?"

"However you wish to describe that night."

Beau chewed her lip. She tucked his phone number into her back pocket and shrugged. "You don't seem like as much of an asshole, now that we've talked, I guess. I'm still pissed that you cheated."

"We're were both cheating at that game," said Caleb.

Almost reluctantly, she smiled at him. "Damn right we did."

"You take care of yourself, Beauregard.”

Beau froze in place. She pressed her lips together and sniffed. “Thanks, I guess. You too.” The words were even more robotic than she expected them to sound in her head. She pulled her shoulders in and scowled. “You and me get into trouble easy, Widogast. Try not to get on anyone else’s shitlist in the next six days.”

He laughed dryly. “ _Ja_ , that is true. I will do my best if you do yours.”

He and Veth walked away from Beauregard with polite waves and thin smiles. What a pair of assholes, Beau thought as she watched them go. Their cooperation was based almost purely on personal stakes, as far as she was concerned; Veth wanting to find a way home, Caleb wanting to get control over the weird shit haunting him, herself wanting to beat the crap out of the thing that had chased her off her own property. A part of her wondered how long Caleb would even stick around before running away with his tail between his legs, just like that night in the bar.

But in spite of it all Beau felt somewhat reassured by the alliance. It had been a long time since she had had anything even resembling a friend and the feeling was awkward and foreign after so long, but not unpleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the lovely comments this past week! I hope you enjoyed this chapter too (p.s. I promise there will be more BeauYasha content, I'm writing it this very second ((p.s.s. I promise Essek is genuinely in this fic and he's on his way))).


	5. man is in part divine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll keep up this weekly posting for as long as I can maintain it, which will be at least for another two weeks, but will let you guys know if i need a break to catch up (I'm kinda sorta writing my dissertation this semester heehee).  
> As always, thank you so much for the lovely comments! A lot happens in the next couple chapters and I can't wait to share the rest of this story with you.

Veth’s reaction to his apartment had been undeservedly positive. Like in the café, Caleb didn’t want to ask her any questions that might upset or embarrass her, but her joy at seeing the grey-walled living room slash kitchen slash dining room as Caleb unlocked the front door made him anxious. She was happy to sleep on the little sofa opposite his crappy television, but he insisted she take his bed at least for the first night. She objected until he fixed her with his best glower – although devoid of any real malice – and she went to meekly replace the sofa cushions.

Caleb began a quiet inventory of his kitchen cabinets while Veth, equally quiet, explored his flat. He was confident that there wasn’t much embarrassing to find. There were two shelves of books, the crappy television that caught two or three channels, the door to the bathroom, the door to his bedroom, a storage cupboard, a wobbly coffee table, and a desk.

She was looking at the trinkets on his desk when he finished his inventory. Luckily, there was enough left in the cupboards to feed them both for a couple days before another grocery run.

“Where was this taken?” Veth was pointing at a framed polaroid on his desk which had until now been tactically hidden behind a box of tissues.

It showed a young boy who looked like Caleb, between the ages of eight and eleven, sitting between a man and a woman. The woman had his red hair and slight build, the man had his blue eyes and strong nose. The little boy sat on the edge of a large fountain. Metal sculptures of women and sea creatures danced behind the three of them in the frozen water spray.

“The capital of Germany,” Caleb answered simply.

Veth hummed and pushed the tissue box back into place obscuring the photograph. Caleb watched as his parents disappeared. “Every part of this world is so strange to me. Sometimes I want to see more of it, get to know it so that it’s not so scary anymore, but… it’s not my world, not this place. I don’t belong here.”

“Have you tried getting to know my world better?”

She shook her head and smiled. “Every day I spend here is one day I could have spent with my son. I can’t love this world.”

Rather than introducing his large collection of books and encyclopaedias on world history and ancient civilizations, Caleb directed her towards the second shelf in his apartment. His favourites were on the top two shelves and out of Veth’s reach, so he pulled them down onto the coffee table for her to look through.

She showed interest in the collections of essays on theoretical physics at once. Many of them still had ten-year-old library receipts taped to their first page. For a while Veth happily flicked through his books while Caleb made space across the room for them to make and eat dinner together.

Apparently, the bones of particle physics resembled magical theory so closely that Veth felt the need to begin making her own notes on the matter. Soon, three of his books lay open on the table next to an increasingly enthusiastic Veth and a pad of paper covered in her now-familiar shorthand.

“We don’t have the same names for particles that you do,” she explained while tapping a page with her biro, “but the models are basically the same. Mages understand that the charges of magical bodies will always balance out, and if not, then a huge arcane force will be released in order to transmute the body into a stable form. I’m not an arcane expert, but that’s what I remember…”

“How did you learn magic?” asked Caleb. He was measuring spaghetti using just his palm and fingers, paying more attention to Veth’s words than the food.

“I stole a book once from a travelling mage,” she said bluntly. “Anyway, I only know enough to pull off my simple tricks. The stuff that you can do already, and what I’m sure you could do when you learn about magic and get better at controlling it, is a much more potent and complex magic than mine. It’s the difference between boiling water and turning it into wine.”

Caleb sat down heavily on the sofa next to her and gestured to the books laid out on the coffee table. “But how are some science textbooks going to help me to do that?”

“I don’t know yet,” she sighed. “But I’m going to help you, Caleb. You’re not alone in this, neither of us are, not anymore.”

* * *

It was an unwieldy few days for Beauregard. She slept in a hostel on the southern outskirts of the city, an acceptable but somewhat uncomfortable living condition, and drove to the chalet two hours before sunrise to arrive on time and drove back over the border close to midnight. This left no time for anything but sleep outside of work hours.

And for the better part of a week, Beau expected fate to sting her again. She waited for lightning to strike. She waited for a monster to jump out at her while she walked between the door of the chalet and the carpark after sunset. She waited for a woman dressed in black and white to appear.

After three days of monotony Beau relaxed a little. Although, she was consciously disappointed by Yasha’s persistent absence.

Beauregard had questions for Yasha now. Unlike the first time they had met, Beau now knew _exactly_ what information she needed to pull from that woman. She was mentally compiling them as she gave her skiing tutorials to tourists and handed out rental boards and boots. She refined and polished her plan of action, to get to the root of the monster problem, and the portal problem, and the magic problem, which she was still certain was just one big problem with many faces. Every draft of her plan of action seemed to include Yasha in the equation. But the woman remained missing.

Beau kept Caleb and Veth updated on this matter. She spent a few hours in Caleb’s apartment at the end of each day, usually over wine and a varying selection of weird European biscuits.

She learnt a little more about Veth and Caleb each night. It didn’t take long for her to notice how little information Caleb shared relative to Veth, but didn’t care enough to prod. As for herself, she decided it want worth lying outright. She told them she had grown up in California, her parents owned a successful winery, she had dropped out of high school. It was enough to satisfy Veth’s questions.

Nothing was out of ordinary, until Beau found a recorded message left on her car phone on Thursday morning.

* * *

Caleb floated through the week like detritus on gutter water. He wasn’t certain that his co-workers noticed the difference, him being fairly aloof on a good day, but he certainly felt different.

He now watched every dark corner in every office and computer lab for creatures and portals. He spent more time than he was eager to admit simply staring at his hands, waiting for something to burst out of them in a shower of sparks. For the first time in a few years, Caleb was suddenly unfamiliar with himself.

The only time he felt like he stood on stable ground, rather than a nebulous dune of shifting sands, was when he was with Veth.

It was rather unfair on her, Caleb thought, that his sense of safety relied so heavily on her already. She was kind to him, not too present to overwhelm him, present enough to remind him that he was not alone, and made him laugh. It was almost too much. Caleb on many occasions thought to thank her for keeping him company both at work and in his cramped dingy apartment, but never quite got the words out.

Much of their time spent together at CERN during that week was working on Veth’s pet project, now their shared passion project. She showed him her work on decoding the portal she had passed through and how she had made the portal detector device. Apparently, one of the detectors on campus was capable of picking up a particular by-product, a sort of arcane pollution, given off by powerful magic. It registered on their machines as a weak microwave radiation. Veth had, in her clever little way, linked the detector’s output to a computer in an unused corner of the building. A code on the device then translated the output and calculated the likelihood of a portal forming within a hundred miles of the lab.

Caleb understood most of her work. Her equation, at least, he could read through easily. It involved some theoretical physics that he had been exploring recently at CERN with his own team, although Veth’s writing had some crucial gaps. Caleb tried to fill the gaps in himself, to Veth’s encouragement, but ultimately failed. There was still something just out of his reach.

Veth suggested that Caleb might figure out the solution after learning more magic. Agreeing superficially, Caleb nursed the growing knot of frustration in his chest.

On Wednesday night Veth left the apartment for groceries while Caleb waited in the flat. He and Veth had agreed to watch a nature documentary that evening. Not that either of them was particularly interested in animals or plants, but the idea was nice. She could learn a little about this world without being reminded too much of its alienness.

Caleb brought out the documentary VHS from the shelf and left it on the coffee table. For a while he lay on the sofa in half-dark.

He almost dozed off but was woken by the feeling of being watched. Caleb opened his eyes and wasn’t sure what time it was. Which was strange because he always knew the time.

Caleb looked around the apartment but saw nothing strange, at first. The curtains were drawn, the lights were on, it was quiet, he was alone. But for a reason he couldn’t put to words Caleb was deeply unsettled.

He stood. The silence was opulent in the room, he felt it on his skin like silk, and he felt it pulse in response to his attention.

Without warning, Caleb was standing in the middle of everything. Existence looked in on itself and saw him, and he saw himself, and he simultaneously understood that he was experiencing the moment – the smallest slice of time cut by the thinnest blade – without constraint. He was human and beyond human and a tantalising unknown was hovering before him in that vibrating silence, something he could not have touched without entering this strange state of otherness.

For many years Caleb had been afraid of truths and of being alive. He had run as far as his legs had carried him away from truth. But he also could not deny that he craved what lay beyond the boundaries that held him at bay.

And reaching for this “other” thing that was making itself known suddenly would mean admitting that he, Caleb Widogast, was alive. It agonised and fascinated him.

That thrumming beautiful horror waited for Caleb, and he put one hand out in ready welcome.

The air tore open around a wide golden gash before Caleb’s hand. He shouted in surprise; whatever had been affecting his mind for the past minute had fallen away and left him confused and afraid. He scrambled away from the orange light.

From the hole in the air a shape fell out and onto the floor of Caleb’s apartment. It was small, about the size of a football, and writhed on the carpet in silence. The golden gash closed like a mouth and vanished.

Caleb panted and sweated where he sat with his back pressed to the wall and stared at the thing that had fallen into the room. He felt awful, like he was sick with the flu or hungover. He was mostly horribly tired. But, strangely, his terror had fallen away.

He ran a hand down his face and crawled towards the writhing thing. As he came closer, profoundly unafraid, it began to resemble a soap bubble. Although round and opalescent, it did not float like a bubble but rather sat heavily on the carpet like a silver melon.

Caleb tentatively touched his index to its surface. It vanished with a soft _pop_.

In its place sat a cat. It stared up at Caleb with large ice-blue eyes, who stared back with his own identical pair.

“ _Hallo_ ,” offered Caleb. “Are you lost too?”

The cat blinked slowly at him and stepped closer. It was orange, spotted by dark brown patches like a little leopard, sleek and gleaming with intelligence.

Caleb was frozen in place as it approached and purposely touched its whiskers to the back of his hand. It sniffed for a moment before rubbing its head over his wrist and up into his palm, purring furiously. 

“Oh, okay.” Caleb let the cat rub against his legs and began petting it, distantly aware of how odd the situation was. “Where are you from?”

The cat turned its orange head up towards him and meowed.

A series of words arrived in Caleb’s head, _from_ _the other side_.

“Ah. I suppose I could have guessed that. A few things have already come from…over there already, hm? Do you have a name?”

_i am yours. you have the right to give me one._

Caleb considered this as he stroked the soft fur over the cat’s head and down its long back. The thing was still purring like an engine and pressing itself to his folded legs with happily closed eyes. “Do you like Frumpkin?”

_it is satisfactory._

Caleb picked Frumpkin up, with no resistance, and carried it over to the sofa. He sat down with the cat pooling comfortably into his lap.

This was becoming too normal, he thought as he scratched behind the extra-dimensional cat’s ear. He was no longer wondering if he was imagining these events. Even if he didn’t fully understand what had just happened, Caleb was calm, pleased even, to have gained a cat out of the affair.

 _i am not just a cat_ , the cat said to Caleb.

“What are you, little one?”

 _your familiar. i am here to aid you_.

Caleb nodded slowly. “ _Ja_. Makes sense.” Frumpkin was in no hurry to aid Caleb in the moment though; the thing lay limp and heavy, purring on his lap, looking for all the world like a regular housecat preparing to nap. “…Are you here to teach me magic?”

_i am your tool._

“Oh.” Caleb wasn’t too disappointed. It was hard to be with a very cute and very soft cat in his hands. He wondered if this creature would require food, like a regular cat, or if it was spectral and immortal. He wondered if it would let him put a ribbon or collar around its neck, like the one his childhood cat had worn.

_and I can hear your thoughts._

* * *

The message on Beau’s phone made very little sense. Veth had sounded frantic, either frightened or excited, possibly both, and had been ranting something about a portal and a cat. The last message was left from just after midnight. It seemed urgent. So, she called the chalet in advance to let them know she wouldn’t be able to make it that day due to a migraine and arrived at Caleb’s flat around eleven.

Caleb’s story was ridiculous and a little worrying. If he hadn’t presented her with the cat that he had supposedly accidentally summoned the previous night, she might not have believed him. The dude was twitchy and weird enough already, Beau wouldn’t have been surprised if he had finally lost the plot. But Beau also was aware of how unlikely her own story of the tarp-monster must have sounded to him and Veth.

For a while, she was unhappy to be close to the cat. Caleb insisted it acted exactly like the sort found on earth, but Beau kept her distance.

“But he is so cute, is he not,” Caleb said softly, holding the cat out towards her. The thing stared back at her with a pair of unnervingly blue eyes and flicked its tail.

Beau crossed her arms. She sat in his apartment behind a mug of coffee that had been graciously provided upon her arrival. “He’s an alien. Or a ghost, or something. It might have come from the same place as the thing that attacked me.”

“I don’t think so.” Caleb lifted the cat up to his face and let it sniff his glasses curiously with its little pink nose. “I have been talking with Frumpkin. He says he comes from a sort of…in-between place. He is not a mortal creature. He could have taken many forms when I brought him here, but he chose a cat shape because I like him this way.”

“That’s not a little suspicious to you?” asked Beau, blowing on her coffee. “It wanted to look a certain way to make you drop your guard, hm? It’s a weird shapeshifting thing that can speak to your brain. Why is that not creepy to you?”

Caleb turned a withering look onto her. “Me and he can read each other’s thoughts, Beauregard. I think I would know if this cat wanted to steal my soul or whatever it is that you are thinking.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. It’s your soul.”

“I don’t know about either of you, but I think this is a great sign,” interjected Veth. She sat next to Beau and was fiddling with the weird device she and Caleb had been working on that week. A small soldering kit lay on the coffee table. “Caleb is becoming more powerful. He summoned that creature—”

“His name is Frumpkin.”

“—yes, Caleb, you summoned Frumpkin, all by yourself. That must have required some tricky magic, yes?”

Caleb shrugged. He let the cat climb up his arm and lay over his shoulders so long orange limbs dangled over Caleb’s grey cardigan. “I suppose, ja. It did feel powerful at the time.” He stood very still for a moment and rubbed at the soft white fur under Frumpkin’s chin. “It felt pretty good.”

Veth continued to cheerfully note down numbers and symbols onto a notepad. “Great! Now, I’m not saying that you’re definitely strong enough to fight that thing in Beau’s back yard but—”

Caleb interrupted with a dry laugh. “I do not think that Frumpkin would be much help in a fight.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Veth said with a kind smile. “But I bet it’s a good first step. You’re learning new things that you’re capable of. First: weird portal-cats, next: you’re making portals back to my home…” She dropped her gaze, meek suddenly. “Or, you know, whatever happens.”

“Veth…” Caleb crouched in front of her on the sofa, one hand still on his cat’s head. He smiled lopsidedly at her. “I will let you know as soon as I discover a way to help you.”

“I know Caleb. I don’t want to rush you.”

“You are not. And I _want_ to help you, Veth. If I can, I will make use of these strange gifts to do so, as far as I can understand their power and limitations. I promise you that.”

She smiled at him, then quickly wrapped her arms around his chest.

Caleb seemed to freeze for a moment before lifting a hand and patting Veth’s head awkwardly. Beau watched the embrace with a morbid interest, sipping from her borrowed coffee mug. She truly did not understand these people. Part of her found their clumsy friendship endearing, the rest of her found it uncomfortable.

The false alarm caused by the appearance of Caleb’s cat-thing went forgiven and was put aside for the time being. Beau fully intended to gauge Frumpkin’s usefulness if Caleb didn’t himself, but understood also that the cat made him happy, and she wasn’t one to deprive somebody of comfort, particularly when that person in question was usually so morose without it.

In the meantime, her and Veth decided to begin their monster hunt early. They packed what they thought would be useful into the back of her car: Veth’s magical crossbow, binoculars, a small battery-powered torch, a flare from Caleb’s hiking gear, among other items.

Veth asked Beau what she planned to do if they tracked the monster down. Veth was prepared to shoot it with magic (Beau didn’t fully understand the intricacies of her capabilities but took her for her word that she was skilled) and was wondering what she would contribute to a potential fight.

“Now, I don’t think I can do that crazy magic stuff like you or Caleb,” she admitted while driving them out of the city, “But I have my skills. I’m fast, for one thing. I can outrun anybody I’ve ever met. I outran that monster last week too.”

“Maybe you could be bait,” mused Veth.

Beau scoffed. “Fuck you. I’m not half bad in a fight myself either.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve never lost a barfight. I’m hard to hit and almost as difficult to dodge. And if the feedback is anything to believe, my punches _hurt_ like a motherfucker.” Beau fought to repress any further bragging. The extent to which she could hurt somebody wasn’t often put on-show, mostly for propriety’s sake, but she was not an unskilled fighter by any means.

She remembered every lesson she had been taught, where to place her blows, how to lock up somebody’s arm from the shoulder down, how to use their weight and strength against them. In a way, she had been itching to put that knowledge to good use.

“But this isn’t a barfight,” Veth said seriously. “We’re hunting a monster. We could _die_.”

“I know. I’m not in a hurry to punch that thing anyway. I got the feeling when it was chasing me that it would not be a good idea to touch it.”

“Noted.”

* * *

Once again Caleb was left alone in his apartment when the noisy women left on their hunt. Perhaps the flat would have felt unusually empty now, without Veth filling that space, were Frumpkin not there. Caleb pondered this as he let his cat chase the small red dot made by a laser-pointer he had borrowed from the lab many months ago.

Caleb was not one to often feel lonely, not even in childhood. The people he did keep around him he usually chose and curated based on their usefulness compared to his current needs. But both Veth and Beau had charged towards Caleb and thrust companionship upon him. It was all a little overwhelming. And now Caleb was wondering if he was just one cat away from loneliness. It almost felt like it; he had spent the first two hours after their departure entirely unsure what to do with himself and a little anxious, worried about what they might find up that mountain. A tiny part of him wished he had gone with them.

But he was at home with a cat. It was achingly nostalgic. Caleb distracted himself from the discomfort by talking with his cat.

Their conversations were silent. Caleb traded thoughts with the creature as quick as light, learning instantly what Frumpkin could see and hear, if he asked to place his mind temporarily within the cat, and could ask Frumpkin to perform all kinds of tasks.

He also learnt that Frumpkin did not need to eat or drink but would put up with the activity if Caleb so requested. Caleb greatly enjoyed pouring milk into a shallow bowl and watching Frumpkin dutifully sip from it. He had been heartbroken as a child to learn that milk was usually bad for a cat’s digestive system. This was somewhat of a balm for that experience.

As the afternoon wore on Caleb began wondering if he could put himself to work. He felt no need to further tinker with Veth’s portal-detecting device (name still pending) but itched to do something nevertheless.

Caleb asked Frumpkin if the little creature knew any minor magic that Caleb might be able to perform. The cat answered that it couldn’t teach him magic but was aware that Caleb already had access to more than just the summoning.

“Can I summon other things?”

Frumpkin made a subtle feline gesture which Caleb took to represent a shrug.

It was difficult to put to words what Caleb understood about magic, but like discovering the buried streets and plazas of an ancient city underneath one that he was familiar with in the present day, he was finding its rhyme and reason to be uncannily familiar.

As he thought about it, Caleb wondered if in order to access magic as powerful as the kind which summoned Frumpkin, he would need to enter the same state that he had the night before. He still remembered the feeling of power running through his body and mind. He remembered how close the membrane of reality had been, close enough to touch and poke a hole through like clingfilm.

Caleb put away the laser pointer and went to stand in the middle of the room, between the small lounge space and the kitchen. Frumpkin hopped down from a counter and twisted between his ankles.

“I am going to try something,” Caleb said aloud, as if to a lecture hall audience. “I will attempt…to cast magic.” He felt silly as he said it but received a psychic buzz of encouragement from the cat between his feet.

Caleb lifted his hands and closed his eyes. He pictured a blank chalkboard in front of him and a piece of chalk in his right hand.

With a deep breath and a furrowed brow Caleb began writing an equation out onto the chalkboard. He muttered under his breath as he went, speaking and writing both theoretical terms and arcane symbols which presented themselves in his mind when he needed them to, fingers dancing through the air and eyes darting about beneath his eyelids.

He pictured the membrane of reality again. It was silky, delicate, and stretched infinitely wide around Caleb and the world he stood on. He described it with numbers, then symbols, and finally a string of runes he had never seen before in his life. The silence in his apartment thickened like fog and Caleb was alone. There was no world outside his flat. Frumpkin was no longer a cat but a long series of numbers and runes neatly pulled together into the shape of a cat by a beautiful net of golden light.

His teeth ached. He tasted static.

Caleb reached the end of his equation, opened his eyes, and saw the impossible. He reached out towards the impossible and noticed a tear.

The rip in reality had been there before Caleb had brought himself here, he was quite certain, but did not know what had caused it.

He looked away and noticed a similar tear further away. They seemed to have been ripped open in the same way. Behind the tears was a wealth of potential, spilling away like water down into a drain, waiting for him to fall in and vanish from this precipice of understanding that he had balanced himself on.

Caleb refocussed himself; he was in a dangerous place. He did not know what would happen if he lost control of the spell. He might vanish, or be destroyed, or become something else entirely.

Rather than lose balance, Caleb conjured a particular anchor: the purple light that he had touched in the carpark, on a night which already felt like years ago and hundreds of miles away. He wrapped this mental image in a tight net of magic and flung it out into the sea of knowledge he stood at the shore of.

At once, Caleb found his target. He cut away the information hovering and thrumming around him which was begging, pleading, for his attention and zeroed in on the source of that little purple light.

Like a reeling in a fish.

The state of potential fell away. Caleb fell too; his lower back hit stone with a dull _crack_ and he was blind.

Caleb blinked and gasped for air. He smelled dust and corrosive chemicals and an unfamiliar perfume under it all similar to cinnamon. The room he lay in was dark, but he was already beginning to adjust to the light and recognise shapes: a tall stack of shelves to his left, a table to his right, a stool, and a door near his feet. It was a small room, like a storage closet, and had no window. The walls were a smooth stone.

Faint cold-white light was spilling under the gap beneath the door. Caleb heard nothing from the other side.

He sat up and rubbed his bruised back, then adjusted his glasses. He had no idea where he was. The plan had – loosely – been to learn what was the cause of the floating lights. He had expected an answer, or at the most a vision of what device or creature was causing them.

Caleb had not expected to be teleported to a random location like in a science fiction film.

He already felt the beginning of panic grow in him like a cold iron spike forcing itself up his throat. He thrust his left hand into his pocket and found Veth’s button, which had been there for almost a week, and curled his fingers around it. His breathing slowed but his heart still hammered.

Clutching the button in his pocket, Caleb got to his feet in the unfamiliar storage room. After a moment he felt a tug in his mind, like the sensation of knowing you’ve forgotten something important, and in the next moment Frumpkin appeared at his feet with a quiet _mew_.

“Oh, I am glad you are here, _Kliene_.”

Frumpkin rubbed against his legs. Caleb took another shaky breath.

“But I am here now,” he whispered. “I should find some information to bring back to Beauregard and Veth, even if this was an accident.”

Slowly, Caleb opened the door to the room he had landed in. Outside was not much brighter, he discovered. A long stone hallway lit by square glass lanterns with fogged silvery panes seemed to curve away out of sight, the floor paved by more smooth stone and partially covered by a narrow grey carpet. Again, no windows. The ceiling was high and arched like a medieval fortress.

The carpet caught Caleb’s eyes at once; the fabric, which resembled a dense velvet, was soft enough to retain impressions from footsteps and other objects dragged over it. There were some faint impressions running up and down the hall. As he pulled the door further open and looked closer, Caleb found a series of feet-shaped marks leading to and from the doorway he stood in. The impressions were distinct and led in only one direction: down the hall to the right.

Frumpkin flicked his tail and went off down the narrow hallway at once. Caleb lingered and listened carefully for any other noises besides his cat before sending his eyes and ears into Frumpkin. For a long distance there was nothing down that hall. Frumpkin walked slowly and quietly, looking for a window opening to whatever landscape was outside the building, but the walls were smooth and featureless. Caleb began to wonder if he was underground. For a nauseating moment he wondered if this place he had trapped himself inside was a prison somewhere.

Before he could wonder any more, Frumpkin reached the end of the hallway. A single wooden door was blocking his way.

Caleb blinked and returned to himself. He was not an idiot; he had recognised the architecture of this place to be foreign and somewhat alien and had already entertained the theory that the cause of the portals and other intrusions into his world was in the same world that Veth had come from. It was one of many theories that Caleb had formulated. It was also his least favourite.

Still clutching Veth’s button, Caleb followed the curve of the hallway to where his cat waited by the door.

The door was made from a dark and heavy wood, like the door to a dungeon. It had squared corners and an unexpectedly delicately wrought silver handle. Caleb pressed his ear to the door for a moment and listened but heard nothing on the other side.

“What do you think is in there?” he whispered to Frumpkin.

Frumpkin blinked slowly up at him. The cat let him know without words that whatever was behind the door was the target of the spell Caleb had cast in his apartment.

“Then, let us find out what is responsible, _ja_?”

Not the first time in the past five minutes Caleb wondered what stroke of idiocy had led him here, to another world, as he turned the silver doorhandle and opened the door.

Inside was a laboratory. Caleb recognised the tables, the racks of chemicals, the bookshelves, the vials and flasks and delicate equipment. But beyond those banalities, this room was full of curious things that made Caleb catch his breath.

Some of it looked like an old sci-fi film. One large device in the middle of the lab was a nightmare of silvery metal beams and grey-blue orbs which curled and spun around on itself like a giant armillary sphere. Another device tucked against the wall resembled a Victorian spinning frame, but the threads wrapped round the long steel bobbins and over the edge of the frame glowed like captured lightning. Many of the lab desks were decorated by strange and fascinating things, such as crystals and shimmering bottled liquids.

In the far wall of the room was a wide window. Outside was pitch night and speckled with stars. Caleb could make out, from where he was lurking behind the door, the distant outline of craggy barren mountains.

It was rather quickly that Caleb realised the stars he saw though that window were of constellations he had never seen before.

But he had no intention to dwell on that thought because he was not alone anymore. Sitting, with their head resting on folded arms, at a desk to Caleb's right, was another person. They appeared to be asleep.

Under and around this person’s arms were many papers, open books, and a few interesting trinkets. They were breathing deeply and soundly and didn’t stir as Caleb crept closer.

This person was not human, it became clear as Caleb approached. Their skin was a dusty purple colour, like amethyst quartz, and their hair was a clean white although their face was young. And their ears came to a point like Veth’s. Caleb made a mental note to ask Veth more about the diversity of people who inhabited her world once he had the opportunity to do so. In that moment, he felt rather ignorant.

Caleb turned his attention towards the many pages of notes and diagrams scattered across the desk. Much of it was written in a language and script which Caleb had never seen before, but almost half was intelligible. It looked awfully like theoretical physics.

He was still three meters at least from this desk and the tantalising information scattered across it. There was also the bookshelf at the other end of the room, which called to Caleb like a siren. If he was going to leave this place the same way he arrived, Caleb wanted to bring something back to show for it. He dithered for a moment, rubbing his chin, before creeping closer to the desk and the sleeping alien.

The notes were on the matter of the quantum arcane. The elegance of the theory overwhelmed Caleb, to the point that he found himself leaning closer, his eyes scanning it, devouring it like a starving man, until he was close enough to smell that strange cinnamon smell again. The perfume came from the sleeping individual. It was so alien, sweet, and earthy, and the research notes so spectacularly complex, that Caleb’s mind fogged over with a peculiar kind of lust that he hadn’t felt in over a decade.

He must have been enraptured, because after one more step his hip caught the corner of a table and sent glass flasks tinkling and wobbling.

Caleb lunged back to catch a falling flask halfway to the ground in his palm. The rest of the rattling equipment stilled and fell quiet. He let out the breath he had held and carefully placed the flask back on the table and looked up.

He had hoped he’d avoided disaster by catching the flask. He had hoped the rattling wasn’t too loud. He had thought he’d been doing a good job of keeping quiet up until this point, but it was now rather clear that he had not.

The individual at the desk was awake. They stood before Caleb and stared at him with purple-blue eyes and a slight smile on their lips.

“Scheiße,” muttered Caleb.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slow burn so slow one of the love interests doesn’t even appear until 30k into the damn fic.


	6. in his hand the lightnings trembled

Caleb was fairly sure this person standing ten feet from him was a man, but more certain was he that this person was going to kill him quite soon. His purple-blue eyes glowed with a cold fury which froze Caleb to the spot like a child caught stealing treats from a cupboard.

“How did you get here?” the purple man asked with a lightly accented voice. He wore a high collared shirt of black fabric, the same fabric as the delicately embroidered trousers underneath, and an elegant metallic necklace of blue beads.

Caleb put his empty hands up in surrender. “Es tut mir Leid. Ich bin verloren.”

The man smiled at him. It was a cruel and confident smile. “Do not play with me,” he said, then raised a hand and Caleb felt his arms and legs lock up like metal rods had been bolted to the bones. “I know that you can understand what I am saying. You answered me last time.”

From where he stood, rigid and uncertain, Caleb blinked at the man in black. He did not think he recognised this man. He suspected that if he had seen him before he would remember. The man was poised and graceful in his movements, clear in his speech, and suspiciously easy on the eyes. Caleb had always thought of his own face as rather plain; while perhaps his eyes or nose or jaw or hair could be found attractive on any other face, once the component pieces were arranged on Caleb the result was somewhat unremarkable, awkward even. This man in black however had the kind of face Caleb could imagine seeing in magazines.

Quickly, Caleb pushed the train of thought away. He was nervous enough to be thinking of the silliest things.

“You answered me when I spoke to you last time,” the man told Caleb again. “So, answer me again. How did you find your way here?”

Caleb swallowed around the dryness in his throat. “…a funny story,” he said.

This time he did not smile. The man cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. He came closer and lifted his hand again. He wore fingerless gloves marked by angular symbols across the knuckles and palm. “I have ways of making you tell the truth. You will not like them.”

“What is your name?”

The question appeared to surprise the man in black. He lowered his hand and was quiet for a moment, just staring at Caleb.

“My name is Essek Thelyss. Might I also have the privilege of knowing the name of the man who so boldly trespasses in my tower?”

“Caleb, ah, Caleb Widogast. This is your tower?” He tried to twist his head to get another look around, but his neck would not move. “It is very impressive. Your laboratory is very impressive.”

Essek took another step closer until he was close enough to touch. The smell of cinnamon became stronger and more complex; Caleb could even make out the underlying and familiar scents of ink and burning wicks. He was half a head shorter than Caleb. As Caleb watched, Essek rose three inches upwards, as if lifted by an invisible force, and looked Caleb evenly in the eye. Although he wished to Caleb could not tilt his head to see what Essek now stood on.

“I am not easily flattered, mister Widogast, although I appreciate your good taste. This is my tower. It is protected by the strongest arcane fields known by any mage in this nation and is particularly well-defended against unwanted teleporting visitors. I would love to know how you came to arrive here.” Essek’s mouth curled into another cold smirk. “And, of course, what you are seeking.”

“I will tell you,” breathed Caleb. “But I ask that you also explain some things to me.”

Essek raised a white eyebrow. “A trade of information?”

“Exactly. It is fair.”

Essek chuckled. His smile seemed no more genuine than before. “You are a bold one, Widogast. I could kill you between heartbeats and you wish to make a deal.”

“My magic is strong enough to bypass your defences, Herr Thelyss. do not think that I am not capable of the same.” The lie slipped out so quickly, Caleb almost believed it himself. But something uncertain and unhappy flickered across Essek’s face as he said it. The man seemed to hesitate.

“Hm.” Essek drifted away from Caleb, just out of arm’s reach. “I see no harm in polite conversation, so long as you do not do anything particularly offensive. Will you behave?”

“I have no desire to anger you.”

Essek nodded and raised his hand, flicking one finger, and the chair he had slept on jerked away from the desk and across the floor. He sat down, folded his legs, and neatly folded his hands across one knee.

“How did you arrive here?”

“I am performing an innocent investigation,” answered Caleb, still frozen in place. He registered that Frumpkin had vanished at some point between his entry to the laboratory and his waking Essek. It would be for the best not to draw attention to the missing cat. “I was searching for the source of magical intrusions to my world. The spell I cast identified this location as the source and brought me to it.”

Essek hummed in interest and tapped his knee. “I was not aware that the people of your world were capable of such things.”

Caleb allowed himself a small smile. “We are full of surprises.”

“Indeed.”

“What did you mean when you said that we’ve spoken before?”

“Ah. I believe you were not fully lucid at the time, so it may have been disorienting for you. You interacted with one of my scouts.”

“The little floating lights?”

“That is what they look like to you. I have been …well, not to put too fine a point on it, spying on your world. Simple curiosity, really. Once I was aware that I could do such a thing I couldn’t help myself. But when you, mister Widogast, interacted with the spell, you were unexpectedly put into direct contact with me.”

Caleb furrowed his brow as he tried to reconstruct his memory of that night. He recalled the darkness on the other side of the floating bead of light, hearing a voice, being afraid, and then the sensation of being yanked back into reality. “It was strange.”

“I imagine it must have been. It is not intended to be a two-way spell.” Essek leaned over his lap towards Caleb. “Now I understand _what_ happened, but not how, and am rather curious to learn.”

Caleb wished he could shrug. “More surprises.”

“Indeed. It is my turn to ask a question. Where did you learn the art which has allowed you to reach me in this place?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer for a moment. He did not wish to lie outright to Essek, for a number of reasons, but also did not want to drop his bluff from earlier. In truth, he was afraid of this man, and badly wanted to escape with the information he had already stolen.

“I studied for many years,” said Caleb. As he spoke, some memories arose unbidden in his mind like foul bubbles to the surface of scum water. “I was a prodigy and studied hard, and later studied under a leader in my field. I and two of my fellow students received tutelage under this man and I later received my qualifications. In my world these qualifications allowed me a position of work at the cutting edge of scientific advancement.”

“What of those two other students?”

Caleb pressed his lips into a thin line. He wished his discomfort weren’t showing as clearly on his face as he suspected it was. “I have not, ah, been in contact with either of them for over a decade.”

“But might they be as powerful as you?”

The thought had not occurred to Caleb before that moment. He had assumed that the influx of magic had affected only _him_ , but what of the other two? What made Caleb special in the first place? Could the magical intrusion be occurring in many other places in the world? The questions springing up in his head began to overwhelm him.

“I do not know. I am sorry.”

Suddenly, the invisible constraints around Caleb’s body dropped away. He regained his balance with a grunt of surprise. When Caleb looked back to Essek the man was standing.

“I do not wish to frighten you,” said Essek gently. It was almost laughable to Caleb, given the circumstances. “If anything, I believe this could be a superb opportunity for cooperation between us. I wish to learn more about your world. What do you wish for?”

Caleb searched Essek’s face. He sensed no lie, although the man had been difficult to gauge since he first spoke. “I wish to learn about yours, Thelyss.”

Essek huffed out a laugh. “My world is barren, Caleb Widogast. At the very least, the parts of this world which I have access to. There is little of interest here, I can assure you.”

“I wish to learn more magic.”

This gave Essek pause. “To what end?”

The air between them was growing dense again with anxious energy. Caleb was not certain whether Essek was casting another spell which made the space around them hum or if the two of them were teetering on the precipice of violence. “What would you do with knowledge of my world?” Caleb asked.

Essek smiled and revealed sharp white canines like those of a wolf behind his dark lips. “What do you think I might do with it?”

“I would not underestimate you. I do not know you.”

They watched each other for a few long and heavy seconds. Something had to break.

The following fifteen seconds occurred distantly, like Caleb watched himself act through a television screen. He broke into a run towards the door behind Essek. Essek, just as tightly wound with anticipation as Caleb, reacted without flinching and flung out an open hand. Pale blue specks of light gathered in his palm like iron shavings to a magnet.

Without even thinking what he was doing, Caleb thrust his own hand out. A spark erupted from his index finger. The light in Essek’s hand sputtered out.

Essek spat out a word in a foreign language. Caleb rushed past him through the door.

The chalkboard appeared in Caleb’s mind. He reached into his pocket to grip the little blue button and began writing the spell which would bring him home as he ran and listened for the sound of another pair of feet following him. But he heard nothing behind him.

Caleb glanced over his shoulder, pausing his calculation, to see that Essek was floating again. He was a few inches off the ground and chasing Caleb like a phantom.

“ _Gottverdammt_.”

With a flurry of feathers and noise a small falcon flew directly into Essek’s face. The man shouted and crashed into the wall, clawing at Frumpkin who screeched and flapped around his head and shoulders. As he watched, Caleb instructed Frumpkin to distract the man for as long as possible while he escaped.

Through the feathers and talons, Essek’s met Caleb’s eyes. They flashed bright, not with arcane energy but with true fury and confusion. They asked for Caleb to stay. They asked for Caleb to open himself to Essek like a study subject, to let himself be sliced apart like a frog on a table, to be pinned down like a butterfly to a board. Essek begged to not be defeated.

The sight was unpleasant; Caleb ran on.

After another second the calculation finally reached its final line. Caleb had no time to check his work but was almost certain he had constructed the spell correctly despite his panic and hurry. Shaking with a stew of emotions, he tightened his grip on Veth's button, reached his hand and mind out to the membrane between this world and the abyss of magic he had travelled through before, held his breath, and fell.

* * *

Veth had vanished into the trees a while ago, saying she was looking for tracks, or something.

While she waited for news, Beau trudged around the perimeter of her cabin. To her relief the place looked untouched. She even found the bottle of wine she had dropped in the snow that night in the driveway. The glass was unbroken.

“Neat,” she said to herself and took the bottle inside her cabin.

The place felt smaller than she remembered. It wasn’t a large cabin to begin with: one main room with a kitchen unit, fireplace, lumpy sofa, and wobbly dining table, and her bedroom at the far end. When Beau flicked the lights on the place seemed to shrink further once the shadows melted away and the room solidified around her.

She realised that for the past week she had been around people day and night; she had slept in the hostel, worked in the chalet, and spent much of her spare time loitering around Caleb and Veth. Her cabin only reminded her of the many nights she’d had between these walls alone.

Beau left the rescued wine in a cupboard and went to find Veth.

The woman was standing at the edge of the forest with her crossbow drawn, looking meaningfully around the clearing as Beau walked over.

“Find anything?”

Veth nodded, then shrugged. “There’s some broken branches about fifty feet away, leading up the mountain. But that could be anything. And it’s snowed a bunch since last Friday, so any tracks it might have left are long gone.”

“It moved super weird.” Beau reluctantly recalled her encounter. “Kinda jerky and awkward, like it was constantly falling over itself. And it didn’t have feet exactly. I don’t know what its tracks would even look like,” she admitted.

“But I did find something.” Veth didn’t sound as excited as Beau had expected.

“What?”

Veth grimaced. “Come look.”

Beau followed Veth through the trees behind her cabin, glaring around at the forest as they went and straining to hear anything over the sound of their feet in the snow hard enough to make her ears ring. The incline of the mountain picked up quickly after another fifty feet. Soon, Veth and Beau were clambering over icy shoulders of black rock, keeping even pace with each other in sober silence.

The ground levelled off a little more but was still steep enough for the trees to be no more than thin and gnarled little things, leaving the only vegetation surviving the snow to be some hardy shrubs growing between the rocks. Veth led Beau over to one of these bushes.

“There,” she said quietly, pointed past the line of shrubs to the flat slab of rock behind it.

An adult red deer lay dead on the ground. Most of its torso was missing, gaping like a big pink toothless mouth. It had probably been dead for at least a day but was partly frozen and struck to the rock in frosty strips of stinking meat. Its eyes were open.

Beau shut her eyes and coughed, gagged, before turning away. She pressed the back of her hand to her face and muttered, “Thanks for that, Veth.”

“How many big predators are there around these parts?” asked Veth, ignoring Beau’s discomfort.

“None,” answered Beau miserably. “Not since, like, a hundred years ago. Bears and wolves got wiped out in Switzerland. You only see them on the other side of the alps, and even then…there’s no way this was a bear.”

“Didn’t think so.” Behind her back, Beau heard Veth picking her way around the carcass, probably looking for clues, or something. Beau was a little distracted. “This is super messy,” said Veth, a little unnecessarily. “There’s bits of deer smeared all across the rocks over here and up into some tree branches.”

Beau turned back around. “How high up?”

Veth pointed up into the lower branches of a thin pine tree, to where gore hung like wet ribbons almost two metres off the ground.

“That’s…that’s a little bigger than the thing that attacked me.”

“Oh. Maybe this is something else,” suggested Veth. The hope in her voice fell flat before it even landed. Beau was already thinking the worst.

“We need to get moving. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

Veth agreed and joined Beau by the shrubs. They found that the largest blood trail lead west, perpendicular to the shape of the mountain range, but further still from Beau’s cabin. As they followed the trail Beau counted the hours remaining until sunset. The sky was already darkened by clouds which promised a night of rough weather, grey and angry and gathering heavy over the alps. They hoped to return to the cabin before the sky burst around mid-afternoon, even if they found no monster.

But to Beau’s growing displeasure the trail they followed through the trees became harder to ignore. They came across small trees and shrubs that had been crushed and flattened to the ground, another two dead animals (a rabbit and a smaller rodent, both viciously torn apart) and a distinct path through the snow as if left by a large dragging undercarriage.

Beau kept her thoughts to herself. Veth, however, was not so generous.

“This thing must be _big_. Like, big as a bear,” she said as they passed a pine tree that had been snapped at the trunk. “Maybe it ate a bear and grew to the size of a _house_ —”

“Please stop putting these images in my head,” groaned Beau. “It was fucked-up enough the last time I saw it. I’m barely keeping my cool right now.”

It had taken Beau a short while to realise how Veth was keeping her own cool on that mountain. From time to time the woman would bring out a small hipflask and take a swig of whatever was inside before tucking it away again into her jacket. The drink, whatever it was, left a flush under Veth’s dark cheeks and hardened her eyes. Beau almost asked for a drink herself before remembering that she was supposed to be the decoy; she didn’t want to risk being slowed by even a second. Instead, she mollified herself with the knowledge that there was a bottle of wine waiting back home.

The trail led them to a plateau. A small lake, more akin to a large pond, gathered water at the foot of a bowl-like cliff face of sheer black rock. The water was bright green blue. A ring around the edge was frozen and broken into wicked shards of ice which floated perfectly still on the turquoise water surface. At the very foot of the rockface, where it met the far side of the pond, it gave way to a narrow letterbox shaped cave, where the water vanished into the mouth and into darkness.

The trail ended as the treeline did. Once exposed to the elements in the valley, the thing’s tracks had been erased.

Veth stiffened by Beau’s side. The cliffs provided enough shelter to keep the bitterest winds out of this little valley, but Veth stood like she was frozen solid.

“You don’t think it’s in the water, do you?” asked Veth quietly.

Beau looked around. There were plenty of places for a creature to hide: under the pond, in the cave, in cracks in the rockface, above the cliff, even in the trees behind them. The sun was an hour away from setting and the clouds were dense; there was not much light to go by.

“Let’s not make too many assumptions just yet, alright?” Beau slid off her backpack and dropped it at her feet, as she pulled out a couple pieces of equipment she went on, “Even if it was, that water is clear as crystal. We would be able to see something hiding in there, right?”

Veth nodded shakily and held her crossbow close to herself.

“You go find somewhere to hide. Somewhere you can see the whole area. I’ll start a sweep to see if anything’s funky. When you hear my signal, I’m gonna start making noise, alright? And if anything comes at me, I’m gonna trust that you’ve got my back.” She met Veth’s gaze and held it for a second. “You’ve got my back, haven’t you?”

“I’ve got your back, Beau,” repeated Veth. Her eyes were wide with fear, but her voice was steady. She set her jaw. “I won’t let you die.”

Beau paused with her hand around the flashlight. “Wasn’t gonna bring that up as a possibility, but okay. Good to know.”

Quickly, Veth vanished. Beau suspected she had run off to somewhere left of the pond but wasn’t quite certain. The woman seemed to melt into the shadows after walking only ten feet away.

Now came her part of the plan. She began by turning the beam of her flashlight on every corner of the little valley. She expected to find some birds or small rodents fleeing from her light, but nothing burst out of the shrubs and piles of rocks. The place was dead silent.

Once Beau was certain nothing was hiding in the dark corners of the valley, she turned her attention to the little lake. She approached the frozen edge. As Beau peered into the green blue water, she felt an echo of Veth’s anxiety stir in her gut; she imagined tentacles or claws bursting from the water and pulling her under and tearing her apart like the red deer as she drowned.

Beau shivered. She had never been afraid of water. She wouldn’t begin to be now.

Finally, Beau lifted the beam of light to the letterbox-like cave across the pond. The darkness turned from a black curtain into crushed shades of grey where the flashlight’s beam was less focussed, more of a splash of yellow-white light across the cliff face. Beau could make out vague shapes on the other side of the pond. She could see the drop of the cave’s roof, stalactites like broken teeth, and behind it all a shapeless grey blob which hung from the ceiling like a giant bat. It was hard to gauge its size from this distance.

Beau took a deep breath and clicked the light off, hiding the cave in darkness again, and tossed it aside in the snow. She looked to her left, blindly, to where she knew Veth was hiding nearby, and clenched her fists, then lifted a hand to her lips and blew a long and sharp whistle through her teeth.

The note carried around the little valley. If there were any birds or small animals nearby which hadn’t already been frightened away by the tarp-thing, they probably would have fled then.

Instead, the only answer was a low rustling noise from inside the cave.

Beau braced herself at the pond’s edge. She watched as a shape spilled out, groaning and rumbling its intestinal complaints as the tarp-thing emerged from the hiding place, over-swollen from violent meals.

It was bigger than before by a few factors. It might have tripled or quadrupled in size, Beau wasn’t certain, and now moved like a giant bag of bones and blood, still spiderlike and evocative of an animated abandoned tent, but now it sloshed and bulged in places when it tumbled forwards. Beau wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream. She wanted to close her eyes and wake up.

She turned and ran. There was over a hundred feet between her and the treeline, enough time for Veth to turn the tarp-thing into a pincushion as it chased her. And Beau was fast. She told herself this as she sprinted over the snow and ice away from the pond.

The splashing sound behind her ceased. It ceased a little earlier than Beau expected, but she had no time to think about that before something to her right flashed bright blue and the thing behind her howled like wind through an open window. There was a tearing noise. A ripping, a rending, then a strange whistle.

Beau ran for another ten feet, wondering why everything was suddenly so quiet, before the ground in front of her exploded.

She skid to a halt. When the snow around her settled she was facing the tarp-thing. It was blocking her path, rustling, wheezing, and impaled by half a dozen dimly glowing crossbow bolts.

“It’s not doing enough!” screeched Veth from the other side of the valley “My bolts aren’t hurting it!”

“What?” yelled Beau.

“I don’t know what to do!”

Beau didn’t have the chance to say another word before the tarp-thing lunged forwards. A grey-cloaked limb landed in the snow only two feet away from Beau, who had jumped back in time to land on the balls of her feet. The thing towered over her like a housecat over a mouse.

She heard her father’s voice. Something about her bad habit of finding trouble wherever she went. Something trite like that. The thought pissed her off enough to push fear down for the moment.

Beau jumped further away from the tarp-thing as it tumbled closer. Water fell off its sides in sheets where it pooled in its slack dips of filthy hide, falling to the snowy ground each time it lunged out after her.

Another bolt sprouted from the tarp-thing, glowing bright yellow and sizzling like oil on a hot pan.

“This is taking too long!” shouted Veth’s voice. “It’s not going down! We need to run!”

Beau growled and slid away from another attack. She hated hearing the truth sometimes.

“You’re right! We gotta go!” she yelled back, then started circling the tarp-thing to make for the treeline. If nothing else, she thought, the pines should slow down its chase.

Before she could clear the tarp-thing’s perimeter, Beau was jerked backwards. She dimly registered something snagging the back of her jacket’s collar, the smell of rotting meat, and the sound of Veth screaming, before everything went dark.

She was being crushed. On all sides, Beauregard’s body was smothered by stinking material as soft as skin and dry as paper. Sharp things like bone or metal rods jammed into her stomach and throat and thighs and hands and skull from every angle through the tarp. The crushing pain was inescapable. She blinked and saw only the dull red of the inside of her own eyelids. She opened her mouth to scream but tasted old blood and gagged instead.

There was something wet spilling over her ribs. She wasn’t sure if it was her own blood or something leaking from inside the thing that was eating her. Either way, it was warm and spreading over her entire left side rather quickly.

The voice of Beauregard’s father came clearer to her this time. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” he had told her. “You look for it, you cultivate it, you give it to other people like you’re proud of it. I hope you’ll see live to understand the pain you cause us.”

Beau might have been crying. It was hard to tell. Her ears rang with the pain of being crushed and suffocated and stabbed. Her skin burned. She was close to passing out. She missed her mom. She didn’t want to die. This was a stupid way to die.

Something exploded. Beau’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. It sounded like a hundred thunderclaps erupting overhead at once.

Thundersnow.

For the first time in years, Beauregard tried praying. She wasn’t sure who she was praying to. It was a quick, crass, and hopeful prayer, but it went like this: please help me.

As soon as the prayer crystalised in Beau’s mind, everything went a little strange.

Time felt like caramel for a moment. The pain stopped. Everything was slow and soft, and it made sense, in a way that Beau didn’t understand. All the nerves in her arms and hands and fingers lit up like Christmas lights. She opened her eyes and instead of darkness she saw truth. It made her want to laugh, and she would have were she not afraid of swallowing a mouthful of foul blood.

The very tips of her fingers, where she touched the horrible velvet-soft surface of the tarp-thing, fizzled. Like soda. Like popping candy. Like sparklers on the fourth of July. Like the light at the end of her mom’s cigarette. The fizzle travelled up her arms and into her brain, popping and sizzling pleasant and sensible. It made sense. It was truth.

Then, the pain returned. Time solidified. But the truth remained lodged in Beau’s mind, ready for her to put it to use.

With a deafening crack and flash of bright white light Beau was violently flung out of the tarp-thing’s gut. She landed on the ground with a crack and a grunt and rolled for a while until coming to a limp halt in the snow.

Another thunder crack jolted through the air around her. Her closed eyelids flashed white.

Beau pried her eyes open. Through a haze of pain and exhaustion, Beau watched the tarp-thing be stuck by lightning. It was speared, again and again, by tall fingers of white light reaching up into the blue-black clouds of the storm. It writhed and yowled its dry wind-howl. It flung out empty arms of flayed skin and cloaked bone. It showered the valley in ice and dirt and stolen coagulated blood while snow fell gently around it like powdered sugar.

And in the middle of the battle was a woman in black and white. She held a sword as tall as herself in her hands and she screamed at the thing in front of her like a wild animal. She was the storm. She was the lightning, she was what Beau had prayed for, and she was the saviour that Beau was certain she did not deserve.

Yasha slashed at the tarp-thing as it was struck by countless lightning bolts. The thundersnow overhead rumbled non-stop. But she wasn’t doing enough harm. Beau could see it through her blurry vision that even this wouldn’t kill the monster.

She pushed herself up onto one elbow in the bloody snow. “Light!” she cried out. Her voice was rough and weak. She cried out as loud as she could, “It’s weakened by sunlight! Darkness keeps it strong!”

Beau coughed. Her ribs screamed and she tasted blood. But the truth she had pulled from that thing’s skin sung inside her.

“Kill it with light!”

That was the last thing she could get out. Beau fell sideways and her vision lost focus. She heard Veth screaming again, somewhere. She heard a thundercrack, and in her delirium wondered if that was a reply from the storm.

But before she could pass out Beau saw Yasha through the haze. Their eyes met for what felt like too long a time while Beau began to fall into darkness. She saw Yasha’s blue and purple eyes, like two wildflowers, through the falling snow. Yasha raised her sword, let out a foreign word of victory, and her body burst into bright golden light like a star had landed on the mountainside.

This light rippled over the tarp-thing. It washed over Beau. It felt like dawn in Los Angeles, warm and sweet. And Beau fell into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is she, you know *shoots lightning out of my hands* a lesbian?


	7. the stars did wander darkling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All your comments on last week's chapter were so lovely, it's almost overwhelming. Hope you like this chapter too!

Beau dreamt of being held. Sitting in her mother’s lap as she read to Beau from a book about brave princes and well-behaved princesses: her father’s arm around her shoulder as he took her through his office: her first girlfriend’s arms around her waist as Beau drove then down the highway at night on a stolen motorbike: an unfamiliar woman carrying her carefully and silent through a forest in the snow.

She slipped in and out of these arms. Sometimes she heard voices. Anxious and indistinct, like hearing her parents arguing behind a closed door.

Once in that haze state Beau came to herself and lifted her head. The pale woman who carried her in her arms said something to Beau, with a voice so gentle that it was lost to the rushing in Beau’s ears, and she fell asleep again.

The next thing she was aware of was water being dribbled over her lips. She turned her head away.

“You should drink,” said the gentle voice from before.

Beau opened her eyes. Yasha was holding out a glass of water. She knelt by the sofa that Beau had been laid out on in the warm and golden-lit main room of her cabin.

“What time is it?” Beau wasn’t sure why she asked the question, but it seemed important in the moment. The blinds of her cabin were closed. Reality seemed like cotton wool around her, soft and warm and ready to slip away again.

“Close to midnight,” answered Veth from a far corner of the room, by the kitchen cabinets. “You’ve been sleeping since the fight.”

Beau looked down at herself. Most of her winter clothes were gone. She was down to her undershirt, which was ripped on the left side and stained by red and brown blood. She wasn’t certain how much was her own. There was a large gash in her stomach. Looking at the wound made her lightheaded. Instead, Beau looked over Yasha’s shoulder and caught sight of a large metal instrument. It was the sword she had seen Yasha wield against the tarp-thing: a beautiful and terrible weapon that resembled a silver claymore, decorated by alien runes and green gemstones, propped up in Beau’s umbrella stand.

“I stopped the bleeding,” said Yasha, still holding the glass of water. “I will be able to heal you more now that I have rested too.”

Beau nodded numbly and took the offered water. Now that she was lucid, she could feel the returning sting in her side, as well as a chorus of aches and pains throughout her hips, thighs, and shoulders. She had been beaten to shit.

After finishing the drink Beau cleared her throat and looked Yasha over. The woman looked almost unscathed, if a little dirty. Her furs and leathers were damp with dark blood and her hair was matted by mud and gore. There was a bruise on her left temple. It looked like Yasha hadn’t spared much time to clean herself up since arriving at the cabin.

“Are you…a doctor?”

Yasha shook her head. “I was a warrior, in my world – mine and Veth’s world. My skills are limited.”

“Then how’re you healing me?”

She raised her empty hands. “It is hard to explain, but I just can.” Yasha pressed her lips together. “Let me show you. Don’t move for a moment, please.”

Beau did as she was told. She was in no hurry to move anyway, due to the growing throb of pain in her torso.

Yasha carefully laid her palms flat against Beau’s stomach. The contact was gentle enough and to trigger Beau’s diaphragm and she instinctively tensed her abdomen to supress her urge to giggle. Yasha didn’t seem to notice; she closed her eyes as a gentle warmth spread from her palms to Beau’s skin and the wound in her side. The pain faded. The aches in Beau’s smaller injuries, where she had been stabbed and bludgeoned inside the tarp-thing, vanished like she’d been hit by morphine. The wound began to close, as if time were being rewound in slow motion.

After another few seconds, the gash was reduced to a long thin cut from her ribs to her belly button. Beau poked it curiously. It might have been an injury she sustained over a fortnight ago.

Yasha sighed and sat back onto her heels. “That is all I can do for you today. I can do it for you again tomorrow morning after I sleep.”

“You couldn’t have taken me to a doctor?”

Veth scoffed from where she perched on the countertop. “Neither of us can drive.”

“Ah.”

“I am glad you are okay, Beau,” said Yasha gently. She was thumbing the rim of the empty glass. “You fought bravely today.”

Beau spluttered, caught precariously somewhere between embarrassment and flattery. “Uh, yeah, thanks. Um. You too. You turned up at just the right moment, you know? I guess I owe you my life now or something.”

Yasha looked up at her with a frown. “No. You don’t owe me anything. I have been hunting that monster in the mountains for a few days. I believe it followed me through the portal I travelled through. I fought it before and was defeated. Then I lost the trail. Today I was wandering and...” She looked over at Veth in the far corner. Veth waved back. “I heard the sounds of spells and shouting and followed it. Then I found you.” Yasha looked at Beau. Her expression was calm, but the intensity of her eyes made Beau’s fingers curl. “You were fighting it by yourself and losing. I couldn’t let you die.”

“I didn’t expect it to be so fast,” said Beau. “And we thought Veth’s crossbow would hurt it more.”

Yasha nodded. “It was strong. But…but during the battle…” She frowned at Beau. “You said something. You told me to use light. How did you know I could summon that kind of power?”

“I didn’t,” Beau answered honestly. She sat herself up on the sofa with a wince and noticed how Yasha flinched in sympathy as she did. “When I was inside that thing I…it’s hard to explain. I touched it and…” She looked at her own hand for a second, half expecting there to be a mark on her fingers to give her a clue. “I knew what would kill it.”

Yasha leant forwards with wide eyes. “Did you hear a voice?” she asked.

“No. It just sort of entered my head. I just _knew_ it, suddenly.”

Veth appeared next to Yasha. “Was it magic? Did you use magic?”

“What? Like you and Caleb do? No way,” laughed Beau. “I don’t know shit about magic or science. This was…it’s more like when you’re trying to guess what someone’s thinking, or when you can tell that they’re lying, or…or when you pick up a piece of fruit and even though it looks fine you just _know_ that it’s rotten inside. It was pure truth.” Beau sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’m really struggling here guys.”

“Doesn’t sound much like my and Caleb’s type of magic, at least,” said Veth, crossing her arms. “But it’s not normal. Might be something else spilling from our world into yours.”

“Or it could be you,” offered Yasha.

Beau blinked. “Huh?”

“It could be something inside you which was woken up by my world’s magic. I don’t know. I don’t understand magic either, but…you seem special. You seem different to me.”

Beau couldn’t respond to that, so settled for staring at Yasha with a slack mouth for a moment or two, before Veth put her out of her misery and suggested that they sleep on the matter.

Beau slept in her bed. Veth slept on the sofa under a pile of spare blankets. Yasha slept on the floor. Alone in her bedroom, Beau had a lot to think about, from otherworldly monsters to women who wield storms to the feeling of truth fizzing in her veins. She stared into the darkness of her room and listened for the soft sounds of her houseguests sleeping in the next room. Eventually, she fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning began with an energy almost entirely foreign to Beau. Her family had never eaten breakfast together; her father would always be on his way to work by the time she was preparing for school, and her mother was often asleep until the midday.

But that morning Beau ate toast with Veth and Yasha.

As they ate slightly stale cereal without milk, Yasha was introduced to many of the devices around the cabin. Veth began by proudly explaining what the microwave was, although Yasha wasn’t too impressed.

“It seems like a lot of hassle for something as simple as heating food. We can do that too.”

“Yes, but you don’t need magic or a campfire,” Veth explained as she opened the little microwave door. “You don’t need to watch over it to make sure it doesn’t burn or get eaten by wolves, either. It just _goes_ while you do other stuff.”

“We’ve got machines that do much cooler things than heat up food,” said Beau, through a mouthful of cereal. “We can talk to people on the other side of the world. We can fly through the air. We can predict the weather.”

Yasha still didn’t seem overly impressed. Although, her face seemed not to budge for most emotion. She crossed her broad arms and glanced around the cabin before asking seriously, “What is your favourite machine that does not exist in my world, Beau?”

Beau had to pause to think. She put down her empty bowl and stepped away from the kitchen corner, looking around the cabin for herself. She thought about the world Veth and Yasha had come from, what she knew of it already, and what she knew of Yasha.

She walked to a cabinet near her bedroom door and knelt down, bringing out one of the few things she had brought from home when she moved to France.

“Have you seen one of these, Veth?” asked Beau.

“No, I don’t think so. What is it?”

Beau grinned. She began making her preparations while Yasha and Veth hovered close behind her, watching what she was doing over her shoulder with guarded curiosity. “Hey Yasha? What sort of music do you like?

“Um. My tribe doesn’t perform…music. We have war horns. They are blown before battle. That’s it.”

Veth made a disgusted noise. “In that case, anything you’ll hear in this world is an improvement.”

“What does this world’s music sound like?”

“Uh, sort of…sparkly. Hard to describe. Not all of it is _good_ , but it’s easy to dance to.”

Yasha considered this. “I am not good at dancing.”

“No pressure,” said Beau as she pushed her Erasure cassette into the machine. “I’m just happy to have the privilege of seeing you hear something other than war horns for the first time.”

The first bars of cheerful drum and synth made Yasha almost back away from the record player. She stared at the cassette player with wide mismatched eyes, while Veth giggled. Slowly, her shock morphed into delight.

“It makes music!”

“It can play any song,” Beau explained, grinning up at Yasha. “So long as I can get my hands on the right cassette – that was the little box I put inside it by the way.”

“You’re right, Veth. It does sound easy to dance to,” said Yasha standing perfectly still.

Beau stood up and forced the grin away for a moment. “Do you have somewhere to stay, Yasha? I’m asking because, well, when I first met you, you looked like you’d been sleeping in the wood for weeks. And I know you said that I don’t owe you, but I refuse to let you walk back out into the mountains after today if you have nowhere else to go.”

“I am fine sleeping outside,” said Yasha.

“I’m not fine with that. Do you have somewhere else?”

Yasha averted her eyes. “No. I fell through my portal during a storm. I know that Veth fell through hers in a river but mine was in the air. It swallowed me while I was travelling through grasslands. It left me on a mountainside at night, where a different storm was happening, in the snow and cold.”

Beau thought of the first night of thundersnow and the taste of static it had left on her lips.

“I was not expecting to find anyone who would take me in,” Yasha went on. She folded her large arms over her chest. Despite her size, she seemed small as she spoke. “I thought that I had died, at first. I wasn’t…I was in a bad place when I fell through that portal.”

Without a word, Veth reached up to take one of Yasha’s hands in her own. She could barely wrap her hand around three of Yasha’s fingers, but Yasha smiled at the gesture with genuine relief.

“It may not seem like it, because she’s a bit of a bitch, but Beau wants to help us,” said Veth. Beau bit her lip to hold back a snide response. “Caleb does too, even if he doesn’t think he’s as useful as he is. We should work together. You’re way stronger than us, and we can help you get home.”

Yasha was quiet. A shadow passed over her expression, something which Beau was barely able to notice, but unable to identify before it vanished. Yasha nodded slowly. “I will help you get home, Veth. If I can be of use, I will help.”

“And you won’t wander back out into the mountains,” Beau suggested haltingly.

Yasha shook her head and smiled. “I will sleep here if you want me to.”

Once this matter was settled Veth immediately wanted to return to Geneva. She wished to update Caleb on everything that had happened and in particular to brag about defeating the tarp-thing. Beau begrudgingly agreed, knowing she had a lot to discuss with Caleb herself, but unhappy about having to drive across the border again so soon. Even after Yasha’s third round of healing she still wasn’t quite back to her usual self.

Groggy and aching, Beau drove herself and Veth into the city around noon. They left Yasha in the cabin. Beau and Veth agreed it was for the best, imagining the trouble it might be to introduce her to the chaos of the city so soon.

Beau parked her car outside the miserable grey building where Caleb lived. The surrounding blocks were largely bars and greasy take-away restaurants. It wasn’t far from one of Beau’s favoured clubs. The road the building sat on was fairly busy, connecting to the main road leading north out of the city after a couple miles and motorbikes and heavy lorries passed by every minute or so. Beau recalled Caleb mentioning earlier that week that he often preferred sleeping in his office; she understood him.

His flat was on the third floor.

“I wonder if Caleb discovered anything while we were away,” mused Veth, swinging the apartment keys from one finger as they climbed the stairwell. “Maybe he learnt another spell. And he might be able to pinpoint where the portals are forming now that we’re sure Yasha fell through the same one as the monster.”

“He’s probably just been playing with that weird cat all day,” said Beau.

“He’s a very hardworking man. I’m sure he’s put himself to good use yesterday.”

“Whatever.”

Veth paused on the landing and faced her. “You know, he told me after we left you at that cafe that he’s scared of you. He was scared shitless of you before you decided to so suddenly become his ally.”

“I’ve never hurt him.”

“He thought you were going to.” Veth’s eyes were hard, like granite. “And he’s still afraid of you, in a way. He understands that you want his help and that we might need your help at some point too, but that doesn’t mean that he trusts you.”

Veth paused. She stood three steps above Beau, putting her at eye-level. The halogen light above them flickered and hummed.

“Do you want him to trust you?” asked Veth.

“I don’t want him to fear me,” Beau said with an unexpected pulse of honesty. She hadn’t spared much thought towards Caleb since she enlisted his help, admittedly with force. The guy had a habit of disappearing into the background of her mind. “I guess I’d like for him to want to work with me.”

“I don’t think he even trusts me totally. It’s gonna take some work to get him to trust you, Beau.” Veth turned and began unlocking the apartment door.

Beau felt dirty. She had never liked the feeling of being rightfully criticised. It was the sort of thing she was supposed to be doing herself: jabbing at others’ faults and baring her own failings like old scars in return. This was a little too much.

As Veth flicked the light on Beau shut the door and went to sulk by the kitchen counter.

“Caleb?” Veth called out to the empty room. His bedroom door was shut. “We’re back. Have you eaten lunch yet?”

“Monster’s dead, I got the shit kicked out of me, but I’m better now, also Yasha is definitely from Veth’s world too,” Beau listed off, massaging her aching shoulder. There was no reply from behind the closed door.

Veth went over to the bedroom door. “Caleb?” She opened it. “Are you in here?”

“Is he out?”

Veth walked back into the main room. She pointed towards the small end table by the door, where the landline and a glass bowl sat. “The keys – the spare keys are still here. I have the only other key.”

Beau could see the panic growing on Veth’s face. “What was the last thing he said to you, Veth?”

“I don’t know, I don’t – it might have…he might have tried a new spell. He said he was thinking about trying…” Veth spun around, staring at the furniture, as if the man might leap up from the behind the sofa at any second. “He said something about looking for the source of the disturbances. He was vague. I—I don’t—!”

“Veth, stay calm!”

Veth clutched her head. Her eyes were wide and wet with panic. “Caleb!”

* * *

As Caleb fell, he felt something brush against the back of his hand.

A net of light in the shape of a cat hovered nearby among the twisting threads of space and time. It looked up at him.

 _you are off course_ , said the familiar.

Oh, thought Caleb. He began to mentally recall his calculations. They had been made in a hurry afterall, and he had no time to check his working before forcefully casting himself through the barrier between worlds. It was entirely possible that he had made a mistake.

* * *

“Will she be okay by herself?”

“Absolutely not.” Beau laid out the last of the takeaway between herself and Yasha. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she tore the place apart.”

Yasha pursed her lips. “I wish there was something I could do.”

“We can wait. It’s the best the three of us can do for Caleb right now. He either comes back or he doesn’t. Nothing we can do about that.”

“I haven’t even met him,” Yasha said around a mouthful of egg-fried rice. “He sounds very interesting. I’ve never met a wizard before.”

Beau shrugged. “He’s no big deal. Kinda awkward, mopey, grumpy, but also sort of full of himself. He cheated me at cards once and climbed out a bathroom window with all my money.”

This made Yasha smile. There was rice stuck to her chin. “You don’t say it with a grudge.”

Beau blinked, unsure of how to take that.

“Even though you talk about him like you hate him, you don’t sound like you do,” Yasha clarified. “There is no malice in your words. I know what malice sounds like. You talk about Caleb like an old friend.”

“I’ve barely known him a week.”

“True.” Yasha was quiet for another moment. She chewed with her eyes stuck to the table grain. “But sometimes you become fond of people without noticing, very quickly.”

Caleb was still missing the next day.

What made the situation worse was how Veth reacted to his absence. Beau found her on Sunday night surrounded by a dozen of Caleb’s nerd books, each laying open on the floor of his apartment like a downed flock of birds, drunk and delirious.

Beau helped her clean the apartment up. She couldn’t do much about Veth’s state but promised to check in on her every other evening.

“Will you promise not to get yourself hurt in the meantime?” asked Beau, dropping the last empty bottle into the glass recycling.

Veth sniffed. She sat on the sofa, swaying slightly, and staring at the far wall. “I’m not brave enough to do nothing…anything like that, anything dangerous. Not alone.”

“Once we figure out what to do next you won’t be alone. Both me and Yasha will be with you.”

Veth flicked a middle finger in Beau’s general direction. “I’m not doin’ anything without Caleb. He’s smarter than you two, and smarter than me,” she slurred. “He would know what to do next.”

She didn’t make any more sense, no matter how Beau tried to talk to her. It seemed like a less-than-rational response, so she took it to be an emotional one instead. Veth was likely hurting from the double pain of losing her family and her new friend so abruptly. But there was little Beau could do about it. She had never been one for emotional support.

Sunday marked the beginning of Beau’s investigation. First step was buying Yasha some suitable clothing. Beau bought a small wardrobe’s worth of items from a thrift store in Geneva and carted it back to the cabin on Saturday, guessing Yasha’s sizes by eye. Beau’s favourite outfit, one of a few she had Yasha model in the lounge of the cabin, was a simple combination of acid-washed jeans, a white cashmere top, and a wine-red blazer. It wasn’t awfully weather-suitable, but it sure did make her figure look amazing. Yasha wasn’t pleased by the clothing at first, commenting on the restrictive tailoring and bright colours, but quietened down once Beau assured her that she looked “hot as hell”.

So, Beau drove Yasha into Geneva the following day to help wade through the city library’s records, looking for signs of portals, errant magic, monster attacks, or anything adjacent. It didn’t slip Beau’s mind that to the uninformed the trip might resemble a sort of date. She disregarded the thought; library dates were for nerds. She was not a nerd.

They began by scouring newspaper reports. Then they moved onto meteorological data. Then finally to more obscure and idiosyncratic sources of data, although towards the end it felt a little to Beau like they were looking under rocks at random.

But to her pleasant surprise, Beau discovered some valuable information. When comparing the dates of Veth’s and Yasha’s arrivals, she and Yasha found some reoccurring phenomena such as localised power outages and snowstorms over the alps. But they discovered stranger occurrences still; on both days, the winning daily lottery ticket was monodigital, being an eight-figure code of one repeating number. Veth’s date was 11111111, Yasha’s and the tarp-thing’s was 44444444.

“I hope this means what I think it means,” said Beau, holding both newspaper clippings in her hand.

“It might be reliable,” murmured Yasha. She sat opposite Beau, tucked into the corner of the library room, and managing to look very small despite her stature. She had become even more shy than usual since their arrival to the city. “Perhaps we should be keeping an eye on these…lottery numbers. When is a lottery number divined?”

Beau smirked. “It’s complicated. The number gets sent out to newsagents at the end of the day. And the number gets decided randomly by a machine, not a god.”

Yasha blushed and looked away, fiddling with one of the beads in her hair. “Oh.”

“I’m gonna go grab the list of daily numbers since you got here, just to be safe,” said Beau, getting up from their desk. “Wait here.”

Yasha didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere without Beau. It was for the best – Beau had been treated to a scant few interactions between locals and Yasha that day, and none could have been generously described as “smooth”.

With the past two weeks of lottery results retrieved, Beau sauntered back over to her and Yasha’s corner of the library, scanning the list as she went. She paused halfway across the room.

“Oh shit.”

Somebody hissed at her from behind a shelf of books.

“Sorry,” Beau hissed back before hurrying over to Yasha. “Look at this,” she said, slapping the list onto the table. “Look at Saturday.”

“five, five, five…” Yasha trailed off with furrowed brows.

Beau grimaced. “Eight fives. A portal totally opened on Saturday.”

“Where?”

“Who knows.” Caleb might have been able to figure it out, Beau’s mind supplied unhelpfully. “But we should keep our eyes open for weird shit.”

* * *

“I see my mistake.”

The currents of time tugged at Caleb’s arms and legs and mind and memory, pulling him in every direction forever. It was only by the grace of his adrenaline-fueled focus that he maintained control of the spell and was not flung away into the infinite like an untethered kite on the wind.

 _point towards home_ , Frumpkin told him. _i will take you there_.

Caleb replaced the coordinates in his equation, cursing himself for the mistake, and let the fizz of magic reawaken in his blood. He pointed towards home, towards his apartment, towards his planet, his universe, his new friends. He thought about returning. He sent a fishing line of magic out through the vast membrane between worlds.

_hold tight._

* * *

Beau was becoming more concerned about Veth. The distance between their homes seemed so large, the time it took to drive over the border and into the city so long, that she considered taking Veth from Geneva and having her stay in the cabin instead where Beau could keep an eye on her. But Yasha assured her that she would be fine by herself in the cabin, that Beau should take care of Veth in the apartment rather than in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest shopfront.

“Besides,” Yasha had said on Monday night, with poorly disguised shame, “I am not the comforting type. I would probably accidentally upset her more.”

Beau neither agreed nor disagreed with Yasha but drove down the mountain alone regardless. As she crossed the border, she muttered a list of her favourite curses for her very short and profoundly uncharismatic list of friends.

This time Beau found Veth asleep in Caleb’s bed. The sheets were tangled around her legs. Her hair was loose and messy, she stunk of beer, and her and Caleb’s funny little portal-detecting machine lay disassembled over the floor.

Beau picked her way over the device’s guts to the bed. She gently rocked Veth’s shoulder.

“Hey,” she whispered. “Wake up. I’ve got good news.”

Veth snorted and mumbled in her sleep, “fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.” Beau straightened up and sighed. After a moment she returned with a glassful of cold water.

The moment the water hit Veth’s face she yelped then leapt from the bed towards Beau, wielding a small sharp knife that had been hidden underneath the pillow.

Beau ducked away in time for the edge of the blade to whizz past her face. “What the fuck, Veth!”

Veth knelt on the bed, panting, clutching the folding army knife. “Oh, it’s you.”

There were better times for Beau to reflect on the frequency with which she was greeted with that phrase, in that exact tone of voice. “Yeah,” she said, pushing some hair from her face that had been loosed from the bun and clearing her throat. “Who did you think it was?”

Veth shrugged and tucked the knife away into her cleavage. She hopped off the bed and fell flat onto her face.

“Ow. Fuck.”

“Are you still drunk?”

“No.”

Beau helped Veth up from the floor, cringing from the smell of booze that hung around her, and took her into the main room of the flat. She began making some food. It was almost midday, but the only thing in the kitchen besides condiments and more alcohol was cereal, so that was what Beau served.

Veth glared at the bowl of wheat and milk. “Why are you here?”

“To check in on you. You’re welcome.”

Veth continued to glare at Beau as she ate her cereal. “Have you found Caleb?” There was no hope in her voice. The question was robotic and obligatory.

“No.” Veth didn’t blink. “But we found something else. Me and Yasha found signs that we can use to track the portals which brought you and her here.”

Veth glanced over her shoulder at the electronic entrails of her and Caleb’s device. She looked at Beau through narrowed eyes. “How?”

“Lottery numbers. Among other things. It looks like things go haywire in this world when the portals open and all sorts of weird things happen. The lottery numbers become monodigital—long story short we know that a portal opened up on Saturday.”

“Where?”

Beau shrugged. “No way to know yet. There might not have even been anything coming through it.”

“Caleb would have learnt more.”

Beau chewed her cereal. She said nothing else.

While Veth took a shower, Beau cleaned the place up. It was becoming a part of her visits to Veth and a significant annoyance. Beau could handle cleaning her cabin every week (and even better now that Yasha was around to help) but Veth seemed to accumulate mess at a supernatural rate. Scrapped pages from notebooks, empty bottles, takeout boxes, motherboards, electrical wires, it never ended.

As the hiss of the shower ended Beau binned the last of the bottles. She had a plan, or at least a quarter of a plan.

“When was the last time you left this flat?” she asked Veth as soon as the woman emerged from the bathroom.

Veth looked away.

“You’re coming with me.”

Beau had assumed rightly. She had sensed Veth’s growing anxiety taking a more complex shape once Caleb vanished. It might at first have been worry over his safety, but it had now transformed into a full-blown paranoia. If Veth couldn’t even leave the flat by herself, then Beau was going to walk by her side.

The thought felt unexpectedly sincere in her mind. Beau let it linger, fascinated by the bloom of affection as she did. She wasn’t aware that she was even capable of gestures of emotional support. It fascinated her.

She took Veth into the city. Veth was jittery and quiet, walking close to Beau’s side and staring at the people and buildings around her with wide eyes. She flinched at car horns and shouts from passers-by.

“You doing okay?” Beau asked as they crossed the bright Rhône. “Good to keep going?”

Veth nodded. “I’m feeling better, actually. I was…I think I was getting lost in my own head.” She squinted out at the blue-green river, at the viaduct in the distance. “It’s become a bit quieter now.”

Beau hummed. She still wasn’t certain if this was the right thing to do. As for herself, the best coping method had always been to punch something or throw herself down a mountain. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay.”

After another two blocks they crossed the Arve, then took a dark little path off the road into the Bâtie woods. The clear winter sky was swallowed by skeletal tree branches, the cold air became heavy with the smell of damp earth and bark.

They passed dog walkers and families with screaming children. Veth stayed quiet, but Beau noticed her eyes linger on the families as parents followed their children through the trees, laughing and calling each other’s names, jumping into the small piles of dirty snow pushed to the sides of the paths. Veth’s skittishness faded once they were deep in the park. But her sadness become only more visible without the anxiety that had grown around it like a thicket.

“Your son’s name is Luc, right?”

Veth nodded. She fiddled with her woollen gloves.

“What’s he like?”

Veth chuckled her head, her smile becoming wider. “So much. He’s a bright kid, very brave too. He sneaks into his dad’s laboratory when he forgets to lock the door just to look at the things Yeza leaves on the tables. I think he’ll be a chemist too.”

“It’s good he’s got supportive parents,” Beau offered a little stiffly. This was unfamiliar conversation territory.

“I’d let him do anything,” said Veth. Her eyes shone. “Whatever he wants. I didn’t have much growing up, neither did Yeza, so we want him to be as comfortable as he likes for as long as possible. We spoil him rotten, we do.”

Beau tried to imagine this kid. She couldn’t help but picture a small, pointy-eared Caleb. “Good. I can’t speak for the parenting experience, but as someone who wasn’t offered more than one path in life, it’s good to hear. You sound like a great mom.”

“I don’t feel like a good mother.” Veth’s face fell again.

Beau scrambled to think of something to say. She understood Veth’s position, wanted to pull her out of her slump, but had nothing much more to offer. She held back a curse of frustration.

Perhaps she should try talking about Yeza, the husband. Perhaps that would only depress Veth more. She could ask about their business, but Beau knew nothing about chemistry. Least of all did Beau wish to talk about herself. It was a series of dead ends.

There was another couple passing them on the wooded path. In the way that one does sometimes, Beau caught a snippet of their conversation as they came closer.

“…and there aren’t any demons,” said the woman cheerfully.

The tall man she walked with replied, “sure, but who’s to say there isn’t anything worse here? These humans could be other things in disguise. We’ve only seen…”

Beau stopped in her tracks. Veth slowed after another few paces, and watched Beau follow the couple with her eyes.

“Beau?”

“Gimme a second,” Beau said as she began stalking back up the path behind the couple. The woman was short and chubby with shoulder-length dark hair and brown skin, dressed in a bizarrely unsuitable emerald sundress. She seemed unbothered by the cold. The man she walked with wore jeans and a plain jacket. He wore his hair shorn close at the sides and long at the front, where it fell over his brow in dark curls.

As Beau caught up, she heard the man speak again.

“There are no wizards in this city, probably none in the whole world.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the woman said, sing-song. “Maybe they’re just super rare. Maybe they’re so special that only the bestest and most rich people can get their help. Oh! Maybe we should become super rich, Fjord! Maybe if we become, like, celebrities we’ll meet a mage who can send us home.”

The man scoffed. “Terrific plan. One of the best you’ve had so far.”

Veth had caught up to Beau. She was watching the couple with similar guarded interest.

“All we have to do is make the people of this world fall in love with us.”

“Everyone?”

“It’ll be easy! We’re both so sexy, Fjord. Maybe it’ll take a while, but we can build up a following, like a cult, but a _cool_ cult, not a creepy cult. And then we’ll be too powerful for the king of Switch-Land to turn us down. He’ll just _have_ to use his super-secret magic to send us home.”

“So,” said the man. “Let me get this right. Step one: we become cult leaders.”

“Yep! And we’ll start with you two!” The woman spun on her heel and pointed directly at Beau and Veth. They both froze in their tracks five paces behind the couple. “Why are you following us,” the woman asked, her bubbly tone turned suddenly razor-sharp.

Beau put her hands up in surrender. “We’re not.”

“You totally are,” said the woman. Her companion hovered behind her, eyeing Beau and Veth with suspicion. “You started following us when we walked past. Are you gonna rob us? Were you listening to our _private_ conversation? Why are you being so sneaky?” Her eyes widened. “Oh my gosh, are you in love with us?”

Beau was struggling to keep up. Luckily, Veth seemed unaffected by the strange woman’s verbal assault.

“Have you heard of Wildemount?”

The woman and her companion, who Beau had assumed by now to be called Fjord, both froze and stared at Veth. Beau also stared at Veth. She had never heard that word before.

“Yes, we’ve heard it,” Fjord said warily. “Where did you hear that word?”

Veth looked around. The path they were on was quiet, save for some muffled shouts from playing children further up the hill and the distant rumbling of the rivers. “I’m not from this place either,” she hissed. “I’m from the town of Felderwin. I fell through a portal a year ago.”

The woman gasped and clapped her hands, hopping about in place while Fjord continued to stare at Veth in disbelief. “Fjord! Fjord!” she cried. “We found friends!”

“Calm down, Jester. We don’t know we can trust them yet. They might be lying. They might not truly be from home.”

“I’m not,” said Beau, politely raising a hand. “I’m from here.”

“Beau’s cool,” said Veth. “She’s a bitch but she’s helpful and harmless.”

“Would you stop calling me a—”

“I’m Jester!” supplied Jester.

“And I’m Fjord.” The man put out a large hand towards Veth, who shook it with her own small brown one. “We’re both in disguise right now,” he added quietly. “We’ve been hiding for a few days. It’s been…difficult, to say the least.”

“My name is Veth Brenatto. We have a couple other allies in this world who are helping us get home.”

“Magic users?”

Veth looked at Beau. “More or less.”

“We…had a wizard,” Beau said slowly.

“We _have_ a wizard,” corrected Veth forcefully. “His name is Caleb.”

Jester gasped again, her luminescent smile turning super-nova. “Oooh! We’ve gotta meet this wizard, Fjord! Please, please, Fjord. I don’t think they’re lying to us. They seem nice.”

Beau found herself fading into the background soon after this. She listened to the others talk but hung back with her hand in her coat pockets, respectfully and patiently.

Fjord was quickly pacified by Jester’s pestering. He and Jester talked with Veth for a while as they walked a lap around the park, talking about things Beau didn’t understand, where they had come from, their hometowns, what magic they were capable of and what they might be able to offer to the growing group of misfits. They were indeed from the same world as Veth and Yasha, although a different part of that world.

They were both capable of magic. They were both in disguise, like Veth. They were both especially skilled at illusions, but Jester was capable of medicinal magics and some stranger mystical powers. Fjord was reluctant to explain much of his abilities but seemed eager to help.

Beau was beginning to feel the sting of envy with each passing minute. As much as she enjoyed the feeling of Truth in her blood, she still felt somewhat weak next to the rest of this growing group.

“You can crash at Caleb’s place,” Veth offered as they reached the edge of the park. “There’s space for the three of us right now since he’s…until he’s back.”

“Really? That’s so nice of you,” said Jester. “It’s been so hard to find places to camp that aren’t super cold. And me and Fjord are lucky we can make illusions and stuff so we could stay hidden while we slept.”

“The homes in this world heat themselves. It’s pretty neat.”

Jester face turned into three perfect Os, like a bowling ball. “ _Woah_. Without magic?”

Fjord turned to Beau while the other two chatted. “We’re very grateful for your help, Beau. If there’s anything we can do to help, looking for this wizard fellow, fighting another monster like you said, anything, you just let us know.”

“It’s appreciated.” Beau nodded at Fjord, who bowed, which she assumed was a normal thing to do in their world, but it felt weird anyway. “We don’t bow in this world, by the way. Not unless you’re super important.”

“Oh.” He looked intensely embarrassed. “I’ll…just give me time. I’ll get the hang of blending in eventually. It’s what I’m good at, believe it or not. At the very least I’m a little better than Jester at keeping things low-key.”

They both looked over at Jester, who was listening to Veth list her favourite places in the city to visit and taking frantic notes in a small leather-bound notebook. Beau decided to keep track of this list. There was no end to the trouble two aliens could wreck by themselves on the city if left unchecked.

They returned to Caleb’s place as a group twice the size that they left as. Beau watched Veth bring out one of Caleb’s books on world history with a certain numbness. The newcomers had dropped their disguises upon entering the flat; Jester was now a pretty blue-skinned girl with curling black horns and a long whip-like tail; Fjord was more or less the same but now had mottled green skin, yellow eyes, and short tusks peeking from his bottom lip. The two of them appeared to be close friends, lovers even, and were happily drinking tea and eating danish pastries in Caleb’s living room while reading about European geography.

And Beau was totally relaxed. She was acutely aware that it should have been an absurd scene but nevertheless felt entirely at ease. Happy even.

She laughed at something crude Jester said then laughed harder when Fjord hid his face to cover his dark-green blush. She bought a fashion magazine from the corner store and gave it to Jester, who was instantly enraptured. She watched as Veth spewed endless misinformation about Earth to Fjord, who appeared to believe every word.

Beau let herself imagine this being normal. It probably was normal, for other people. It felt good.

* * *

_we’re here._

When everything became real again Caleb was in darkness. Also, his arms hurt.

He felt around himself. His hands landed on soft ground, carpet, then the edge of some furniture. He patted upward until one of his hands found the shape of somebody’s leg.

Caleb was promptly struck in the chest. He toppled backwards with a grunt, still blind.

“Fjord!”

There were noises around him, sounds of blankets being tossed about and an unfamiliar woman’s voice muttering in a foreign language. Then, a bright pink light erupted ten inches from his face.

A blue-skinned woman was staring at him with wide violet eyes, her hand outstretched, her left leg lifted after it had kicked him in the sternum, and pink magical energy gathered in her palm like he had seen Essek do only a minute ago. The woman blinked at him.

A man’s voice came from directly behind Caleb. “Speak your name.”

“Ca-Caleb Widogast.”

The woman’s face split into a grin. “Oh! We know you! So, _you’re_ Caleb, huh? This is your home, right? I’m Jester, it’s nice to meet you.”

The overhead light flicked on. Caleb blinked in the sudden bright light, finding himself in his flat, kneeling by the sofa where the woman named Jester lay. A green-skinned man was standing nearby holding a sword.

Caleb barely tore his eyes away from the glowing weapon before noticing Veth standing by the light switch in a nightgown.

“Caleb!”

He was engulfed in an embrace before he could respond. Veth was warm and heavy around his neck. She was muttering incomprehensible things, about missing him, worrying, threatening violence if he ever did _this_ again, and squeezing him like he was the most precious thing in the world.

“ _Hallo_ , Veth. I am sorry I worried you.”

She sniffed. “I didn’t know where you were. Are you hurt?”

“I am okay,” he said, gently lifting her away from his neck. Veth’s tear-damped face was creased with concern. “I have learnt things, Veth. There is a lot to discuss.”

“Absolutely,” she said, her voice thin and quiet. “We killed a monster while you were away. Me and Beau, with Yasha.”

Caleb smiled weakly. “That is impressive.”

“But…where were you?”

“That is hard to say.” He paused, looking around the room, at the two strangers – the beaming blue girl and the sword-wielding man – then back to Veth. “How…how long was I away?”

“A little over two weeks.”

“Ah.”


	8. the sun that cheers, the storm that lowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always for the lovely comments! This is gonna be a long fic with a lot of plot and slow-building relationships, so I'm super grateful for your support and patience. As a reward have some awkward/tense flirting.

Caleb forewent formal introductions to the newcomers. He had gathered that they were in a similar situation to Veth and that they were both capable of magic given that one summoned a glowing sword and the other almost shot him point-blank with glittering pink light. But he did not dive into conversation with them after returning home.

Caleb pushed himself to his feet and staggered over to his shelves. He began pulling all of his empty and half-used notepads down and onto the floor.

“Caleb?”

“Please bring me a pen, Veth. Or a few.”

“Where were you? What did you find?”

Caleb put his hand out. A pen was placed in his palm. “I traced the source of the purple lights I had seen the same night that Yasha and that monster arrived. The spell took me there, I was not expecting it, but I travelled to that world.” He paused his notes and looked up at Veth. “I opened my own portal.”

She put a hand over her mouth. “…Caleb.”

He went back to furiously writing in the notebook. “I found who had created those lights. A man in a castle. His name is Essek Thelyss. I know very little more about him, but I am certain he is a very powerful wizard.”

“Caleb.”

“I saw his laboratory. I saw devices, magical technology, pages of his spell-work. I remember all of it. If I write it out, and I can recall it perfectly, I may be able to copy his spells myself.”

“Caleb!”

Veth had seized his wrists. She knelt by his side on the carpet and stared up at him with large worried brown eyes.

“Your arms, Caleb.”

He finally looked down at himself. His shirt sleeves were soaked through with bright red blood. Sucking in a breath, Caleb rolled up the sleeves to reveal long cuts across his forearms identical to those he had found that night in the car park. The blood was smeared across his arms and wrists already, making the cuts look worse than they were, and the numbness granted by adrenaline was beginning to fade. Caleb felt a little lightheaded.

“Ah.”

“You said you were safe, Caleb,” sighed Veth. “How did this happen?”

Caleb frowned. He realised with a slight start that he understood exactly how it had happened.

“My cat. You see, I made a mistake when casting the spell to take myself home. The spell went a little…haywire. I almost lost myself but Frumpkin guided me back towards reality. That is why I am late. The coordinates that I submitted were…slightly to the left. I landed in the future. But Frumpkin pulled me back home, and that is why my arms are bleeding.”

Veth blinked at him. Behind her, Jester and the green man looked even more so confused. “Your cat…?”

“His claws.” Caleb hooked his fingers over his bleeding arms to illustrate. “He did it the first time I accidentally followed Essek’s magic over the boundary. He pulled me to safety, both times.”

Carefully, Caleb pulled his sleeves back over the cuts. He would clean and bandage them later. For now, he hoped nobody in the room had noticed the older, more wicked scars that crossed the backs of his forearms in the meantime.

“I need to work on this for a while, if that is okay, Veth,” said Caleb, pointing at his notes. “This is important.”

She sighed, rubbing her arms. “Okay. I’m probably not going back to sleep anyway.” She turned to the others. Jester was watching Caleb write. The green man was sitting on the sofa and yawning, his sword now dispelled. “Sorry, you two.”

“No, it’s okay,” said the green man. “I’m glad to see your friend is safe.”

“I knew he was coming back,” Veth huffed. “I knew it. Beau didn’t believe me, but I never believed he was lost for good.”

Jester smiled at Veth, kneeling by her side, and pushing her tangled brown hair away from her drying eyes. “I believed you, Veth. And I’m sure this is the beginning of our good luck.”

Caleb wrote until the sun came up then for some hours longer. He was dimly aware of the other three chatting around him, making food, leaving a message on Beau’s car phone, laughing, leaving the apartment. But he barely looked up from his notebooks. There was so much in his head. Lists of numbers, symbols, diagrams, theorems fell through his memory and down his fingers and onto the page like a steady stream of water. He copied it perfectly, as far as his memory would allow, for every word he saw in Essek’s laboratory.

Much was in a language he did not understand. When he showed it to the other three, they did not recognise it either. But when Caleb sat back on his heels and looked over the pages strewn across his carpet and coffee table something was coming together in his mind. Like seeing sheet music where half of the notes were erased, Caleb could recognise the gaps in his understanding of this magic but could nevertheless see the general shape of it.

Veth helped him organise the pages into thematic clusters. There were pages on temporal disruption, pages on gravitational manipulation, pages on potentiality and probability. To Caleb, with all his years studying theoretical and practical physics, it was so achingly familiar. Like hearing a song from childhood.

Around noon Beau arrived. She brought Yasha, which brought Caleb’s tiny apartment to near-capacity.

Yasha, whom Caleb had never seen before now, waved sheepishly at Caleb as Beau shut the door behind them. “Hello,” she said, with a voice deeper and gentler than expected. “Thank you for having me.”

“It is no trouble,” said Caleb. He was noting down a list of foreign words from Essek’s notes on a separate sheet of paper, with Fjord’s help, hoping to use code-breaking methods to understand the man’s language. It would take days or weeks or longer, but the gaps frustrated Caleb to a painful degree to leave untranslated. “Make yourself comfortable.”

There was little room left for either woman to make themselves comfortable. Beau folded herself up on the armrest of the sofa by Caleb’s side. Yasha awkwardly leant against a wall by the television and took an offered glass of water from Jester with a tight smile.

“So,” began Beau as she unbound her hair from a messy bun. “Veth said you met a guy called Isaac.”

“Essek.”

“Whatever. A magic scientist? Like you?”

“Something like that. He was powerful, much more powerful than I. He was not human.”

“No?” Fjord looked up from where he was copying down words. “What did he look like? Like me or Jester?”

Caleb shook his head. “He is around my size. No tail or horns. He has dark purplish skin and white hair and pointed ears.” He pinched his fingers an inch behind his own ears to demonstrate. “And purple eyes.”

Both Yasha and Veth said, simultaneously, “oh.”

“Huh?” Beau snapped her head over to where they stood near the TV. “That sound familiar?”

Yasha rubbed her neck and said nothing. Veth nodded, looking a little pale, and said, “sounds like a drow. They live across the border near my village.”

“Oh, a dark elf!” piped Jester. “I’ve heard of them. They’re super creepy. They can’t stand sunlight and they wear weird armour like a beetle and steal children who don’t do as they’re told and chop them up and turn them into stew in big metal cauldrons.” She paused. “That’s what my mama said.”

Beau finished tying her hair into a long braid down her back. She rubbed her brow and looked back down at Caleb’s notes with a sigh. “We’ve stolen an evil elf’s homework. Cool.”

“Anyhow, it is not much use to us if I cannot understand it,” said Caleb, his nose buried in his book on codes. He had broken a few in his free time for fun and could already tell that this would take a while. “This is going to take me a while. In the meantime, those of you who know what a…a _drow_ is, you should discuss why he might be involved.”

“What are you doing?” asked Beau.

“What does it look like?” answered Caleb, a little irritably. He was used to working alone in quiet. As much as he was coming to like Beau and Veth’s company, being forced to study around four chatty people was getting on his already frayed nerves. “Half of this is in a language none of us understand.”

“This language?” Beau touched a word on the list Fjord held.

“Yes,” said Fjord. “That word turns up a lot. We think it might be a method of refinement or—”

“ _Volthis_ ,” muttered Beau. “Powdered iron.”

Caleb stared at her. Fjord and Veth and Jester and Yasha stared at her, then at Caleb, then back at Beau.

Beau blinked. “Is that not right?”

“Where did you learn that word, Beauregard?” asked Caleb slowly.

“Uh.” Beau’s blank face began to morph into a smile. “Oh, oh ho! Oh shit! I’m fucking awesome!”

“Is there something I’m missing?”

“Caleb!”

“What?”

“Say something in German.”

“I don’t—”

“Do it!”

“…Du machst mir Sorgen, Beauregard.”

Beau jumped to her feet and punched the air. “I’m a god.”

“Please explain,” demanded Caleb, raising his voice for the first time. The others in the room looked to him to be equally baffled. “You are sounding mad.”

“I understand all of those words,” she said, pointing at the note in Fjord’s hand, “and everything on your other pages. Even though I’ve never seen that language before, I don’t even know what it’s called, I understand it. And I understand German now too! I’ve never studied it!” She was grinning ear to ear.

“How–”

“Weird magic stuff, I dunno.” Beau flopped back onto the couch. “You weren’t here, but when we killed the tarp-monster I kinda like…touched it and learned stuff about it.”

“It was very helpful,” said Yasha, the first thing she had said for a while.

“Uh, yeah, no problem.” Beau gave Yasha a thumbs-up. “Um. It kinda happened without me realising. But I felt this weird energy in my arms and then suddenly I knew how to kill it. I don’t think I can do crazy stuff like you,” she said, prodding Caleb in the shoulder and making him flinch, “turning into birds and teleporting, you know. But I’m getting cooler.”

“Any indication of where these abilities are coming from, Beauregard?”

“Probably where yours are coming from. Yasha’s world.”

Jester hummed in thought. “There are some people in our world who can do that stuff,” she said, playing with a trinket hanging from her hip. “There are lots of sources of magic though. Like, mine comes from my god – he’s super cool and teaches me the best tricks. But people like Caleb and Essek learn their magic like a science, from books.”

“And sometimes people learn they can do incredible things by themselves,” added Fjord. “It seems Beau is like that. I was sort of like that.”

“You were?” asked Beau.

“It’s a bit of a long story.” He ran a thumb over his lower lip and looked away down at the carpet before Jester caught his eye. He took a deep breath and began, “I…a very powerful being gave me powers in return for my service. At first, I didn’t understand where this power stemmed from. I thought it might have just been _me_.” He gave Jester a thin smile. “For a while I enjoyed those boons before I recognised the danger that my allegiance was putting me and the people I care for into. So, I broke the pact. This creature hunted me in revenge for betraying it. With the help of Jester and another good friend of ours I allied myself with another, a benevolent deity, who gave me similar power with the intent for good, rather than evil.”

“You were never evil, Fjord,” said Jester with a gentle smile. “You are clever and brave and kind. Me and Caduceus could see it all along.”

“But I didn’t make any pact,” interrupted Beau, leaning forwards with a frown. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

“I’m not saying that’s what happened to you,” laughed Fjord, breaking the slight air of melancholy left by his story. “Mine is a special case. I believe your power comes from within, like your body is the weapon itself.”

Beau appeared to think about this. An irritatingly smug grin spread across her face as she nodded in approval. “I like that. I like the sound of that a lot.”

Against his better judgement Caleb was happy for her. The slow and seeping influence of the other world was invisible and just as unpredictable as it had been when Caleb first encountered it, but this intrusion had proven itself to be ambivalent.

True, a flesh-eating nightmare monster had been dropped into Beau’s backyard but in the meantime, she had also been blessed with a supernaturally intimate relationship to Truth. It was clear to see how much joy these powers brought Beau. And for all that Caleb’s life had been disrupted, he had to admit to himself how much of a thrill it was to bend reality to his will.

“Beauregard.” He tapped her on the knee. “Would you do me a favour and translate the rest of Essek’s writing for me?”

“Oh. Sure.”

As he expected, she was more than happy to help. He had come to understand Beauregard. She craved validation, a certain kind of attention, certainty, and comfort that came with total control over the situation around her. The supernatural abilities she had been granted were all too fitting.

And Beau practically glowed with pride as she translated the foreign words in Essek’s copied notes. Caleb let her relish the satisfaction it must have brought her. He could guess, from the tired faces he had teleported back to, that she and Veth had had a rough fortnight without him. It was strange to think that they might have missed him. It was stranger still to imagine them searching for him and worrying for his safety. He hated thinking of their anguish.

Caleb felt himself smile as Beau cheerfully flipped through pages of arcane theory, as Veth watched with wide eyes full of anticipation, as two almost-strangers sat side-by-side with faces full of hope. This was a room of friends, he realised with a start.

* * *

There were many hours in the day when Beau didn’t know where Yasha was. She left her in the cabin while she worked at the chalet and Yasha never complained about it nor did she ask for things to do in the meantime. She seemed to occupy herself.

There was one day when Beau returned to the cabin to find that Yasha had hunted and slaughtered a red deer in her absence. Yasha had even been kind enough to begin turning the animal into a meal. Beau gently explained that what she had done was illegal, but very sweet nonetheless.

For the most part Beau assumed that Yasha had been wandering the mountainside in her absences. The traces on mud and pine needles dusting her boots and furs at the end of the day suggested so. And Beau understood without need for an interrogation that Yasha was difficult to keep in one place for long; she drifted and lingered as she pleased like a storm cloud.

As Beau drove Yasha over the border, through the snow, home (and she was happy to call it that, now that Yasha shared the cabin with her) Beau recalled a night from the past week.

In Caleb’s absence they had both grown sluggish as the momentum driving their investigation waned. The newcomers staying with Veth were eager to help, but they desperately needed Caleb’s insight into the portals before choosing their next steps.

So, Yasha and Beau sunk into a strange comfortable laziness together. They ate from every takeout restaurant in Geneva Beau could find just to show Yasha food from all over the world. She took Yasha to the museum. They took a funicular up a taller mountain; Beau joked that Yasha could stand still and vanish against the monochrome mountainside; Yasha smiled and froze still, while Beau raised the camera to her face, and she might have been nothing but two dots of blue and purple against the snow.

But one night in the cabin stuck in Beau’s memory like a splinter in her thumb, or a perfume to her clothing. The memory returned to her again and again over that slow fortnight.

Beau had returned from the chalet. She went to shower while Yasha began preparing a meal. As the hot water stung her skin, Beau laughed at the domesticity of it all.

When Beau emerged in sweatpants and a bra, still drying her hair with a towel, Yasha was fiddling with the cassette player.

“Need help?”

Yasha hummed. “I don’t want to break it.”

Beau wandered over, tossing the damp towel over the couch, and dropped to a crouch by Yasha. “You press this button first. Then you take out the cassette you were listening to…this was pretty shit, I’ll put on something you’ll like. Then you put the new cassette into the machine. This thing is second-hand so you gotta wait a sec before you get it going. Hm, now you press this button with the triangle.”

The player hummed. Beau tapped her knees as she waited for the music to begin and glanced at Yasha.

Yasha was staring at Beau; she didn’t seem to realise it until she met Beau’s eyes, and quickly looked down at the cassette player.

The opening bars began, slow and dreamy.

“What is this song called?” asked Yasha. She was staring at the player like she was staring down prey.

“Um. Rhiannon. An American woman sings this. America is where I’m from.”

“I remember.”

They knelt in front of the player for a moment or two. Beau tried to recall how to speak, but she felt frozen in place, enchanted and aware of Yasha beside her to the point of madness.

“I like this song.”

Beau nodded. She didn’t know much about Yasha but understood her gentleness. It wasn’t the kind of soft manner which survived from childhood, like perhaps Jester’s – it was the sort which formed from years of pain and unrelenting difficultly, and the gentleness is there in spite of it all, like the soft edges of sea glass.

Beau stood up. “Can you dance?”

Yasha startled. She followed Beau with her eyes as she walked towards the centre of the room away from the player. “I…I was never taught how to dance. So, uh, no.”

“Me neither,” said Beau. “Do you wanna try?”

Slowly, like a glacier, Yasha rose and joined Beau in the middle of the cabin. Neither was sure how to begin. Beau tried raising her hands like she remembered a waltz beginning, and Yasha mirrored her, rather uselessly. Then, Beau tried putting their palms together. It felt even worse.

Finally, they settled on a half-embrace. Yasha rested her arms over Beau’s shoulders, Beau put her hands on Yasha’s hips. It was only an inch more intimate than whatever frontier they had previously reached together.

As they began swaying, the song changed.

“Oh!” Beau said suddenly, startling Yasha again. “This one’s pretty.”

Yasha nodded seriously. She appeared to listen closely to the melancholy opening lyrics.

And Beau began dancing. She didn’t realise it until the song was halfway through, but she led Yasha through the first verse and chorus with a lift of her shoulder and twist of her hip, encouraging Yasha to copy. It might have been embarrassing to watch, but Beau may as well have been blind. The feeling of standing in the middle of music with Yasha was remarkable.

“ _And lightning strikes…maybe once, maybe twice_ …”

Towards the end Beau noticed Yasha humming along to the song. She felt the words rumble in her chest as Beau pressed her ear to the soft cotton of Yasha’s shirt.

“ _She is dancing away from me now. She was just a wish; she was just a wish_ …”

When the song ended Beau told herself the moment had meant nothing. But that night she lay in bed holding her hand to her own chest and trying to remember the steps of the dance.

As Beau drove up the mountain through the snow, she itched to look at Yasha in the passenger seat. The memory of that night in the cabin, the music and dance, always made her want to stare. It made her want to feel her hands on Yasha’s hips again, her breath on Beau’s neck, her low hum as they followed the song through the dark. It made her chest ache.

* * *

Veth had kindly informed Caleb’s co-workers that he had been deathly ill for the past two weeks. But he returned to the lab to find that nobody was quite sure what he had fallen ill with. Somebody congratulated him on overcoming his shingles. Someone else asked how he was walking without crutches already. A woman gave him a cross-generational recipe for throat-soothing tea. For all intents and purposes, Caleb Widogast was a very sick man.

He, like usual, went about his business without conversation if he could help it. He was a good liar, but he didn’t love to lie. He would rather move past all the consequential embarrassment of his failed return spell as soon as possible.

Caleb turned his mind to other things as he looked through a pile of data sheets in a room two floors underground as the giant metal intestine of LEP loomed somewhere below him.

He had a whole list of things he could attempt thanks to the notes he had copied. The ideas danced in his mind and possessed him with a nervous excitement, something he hadn’t enjoyed since childhood. It felt like the first time he had seen lightning.

All that stood in his way was his own inexperience. He knew now that he was prone to mistakes, despite his natural gifts. And some of his ideas were just as dangerous, if not more so, than the spell he had accidentally cast two weeks ago.

Some could destroy him. Some might do worse.

Caleb sat on a wooden desk chair and let his eyes settle on the wall of lights and dials and monitors walling him in. There had to be a way to practice this magic without risk to himself. He had to find it. He was hungry for it.

“What a strange laboratory.”

Caleb looked to his left. Essek stood in the middle of the room, his arms folded across his chest, looking around at the lights and dials just as Caleb had been doing. He looked calm.

“ _Hallo_ , Essek,” said Caleb, not moving to stand up. “Welcome to Earth.”

Essek smiled at Caleb. He didn’t move closer. “It is rather disappointing. I expected it to be bigger.”

Finally, Caleb noticed the distortion around Essek. He wasn’t all-there. The edges of his body blurred like smudged ink and even when Caleb looked directly at the man he didn’t seem to ever be fully in focus. Essek had not _teleported_ through the border like Caleb had. This seemed to Caleb like a pertinent piece of information.

“Where were you these past two weeks? I was concerned,” Essek went on. “I would have spoken to you sooner otherwise.”

“I made a calculation error,” said Caleb, getting to his feet and coming closer to Essek. “I arrived a little late. I…I time-travelled.”

Essek laughed. It seemed genuine and Caleb found himself surprised by the sound of it – warm and bright like a midsummer’s full moon. “Impressive. I wasn’t aware that could be a side-effect of inter-dimensional teleportation. This is very interesting.”

“What is it you wished to talk to me about?”

“Oh. Many things. Perhaps I was most curious about where I might find you once I succeeded in linking myself to your mind like I am doing now,” said Essek. Caleb’s mind filled in another blank: this was not teleportation spell at all, but rather an induced hallucination. It seemed rather simple to Caleb, once he understood it, and quite a beautiful idea. “And now I have the pleasure of meeting you again. Might I ask who you are, Widogast?”

“I am many things. You should be more specific.”

“Your profession, then, to begin with.”

“I am a particle physicist. I study the minuscule building blocks of the universe, the energy which binds them together, and the inscrutable transformations which take place on that micro-scale.” Caleb smiled. “Perhaps the closest thing this world has to a wizard.”

“I’m honoured.”

“May I learn who you are?”

“I am a wizard,” said Essek. “A real one. I specialise in the manipulation of matter, fate, and time. I am the most talented spellcaster in my nation.”

“The nation of…?”

“The Kryn Dynasty. I will not bore you with the geographical details. I am my Queen’s appointed master of the arcane, a trusted advisor too. There is little that I do not understand in the realm of magic, the planes, and the ancient. My title is Shadowhand.”

Caleb folded his arms and stepped closer. “Such prestige. I feel rather underdressed.”

For a moment Essek simply stared at Caleb. His purple eyes scanned Caleb’s thread-bare jumper, muddy boots, and wind-swept hair. It was not the kind of appearance Caleb would have wished to present to Essek, had he the choice and fair warning.

“Perhaps. But you are a talented mage yourself, no? Is this your laboratory?”

“No. I share this workplace with hundreds of other scientists.”

“Are they as equally skilled as you?”

“No,” Caleb answered immediately. “They are not. I am the only one you found you afterall, Herr Thelyss.”

Essek smiled again. “Correct. Speaking of which, I also intended to apologise for my behaviour that day. I was startled by your appearance and was too quick to jump to violence. I hope you understand that I wish I had been more cordial.”

“And I apologise for my trespassing.” Caleb stood only a meter from Essek – or rather his projection – and found himself feeling oddly serene. Perhaps he would have felt different if Essek were truly in the room. Perhaps he would have smelled that strange cinnamon-like perfume again. “It was not my intention to teleport at all and curiosity overcame me.”

Essek looked surprised. His violet eyes raked over Caleb as he huffed a short laugh. “You didn’t even intend to teleport?”

“I told you the truth when we met; I was looking for the source of your scout-lights. But I didn’t intend to…to _bamf_ towards that source. I did not know it was possible.”

Essek didn’t seem bothered by Caleb’s untechnical language, rather he was staring at Caleb with unashamed fascination. “To what extent are you aware of your capabilities, mister Widogast?”

“I know that I am strong,” he answered. Caleb felt no great inclination to lie. He felt safe speaking to Essek, who was not in the same world, and who – as Caleb had rightly assumed – was unable to teleport from his world to Earth. The power that this information granted Caleb made him a little drunk. “But I am rusty and at a disadvantage, given that my world is largely unaware of magic, unlike yours.”

“You were very bold to lie to me about this when we met.”

“I never lied to you.”

“But you certainly avoided the truth.”

“I was afraid for my life.”

“I would not have killed you.”

“What would you have done to me, then?”

“Imprisoned you, tortured you, pulled every piece of available information from you, shown you to my queen in chains. _She_ might have killed you.”

It was Caleb’s turn to smile. “You would not have done that. I fascinate you too much. You would keep me for yourself.”

“Perhaps.”

They stared at each other for a moment in quiet. Caleb slowly put out a hand and let it pass through Essek’s torso. The air where he should have stood felt cold and charged and made the hairs on the back on his arm stand up.

“Is there anything else you want from me?” asked Caleb, his arm still submerged in Essek’s chest up to his wrist.

Essek tilted his head, narrowing his eyes at Caleb. The silverware in his ears glinted under white lights that were not present in the room around them. “Not now. I am simply glad to have seen you again. You are an oddity among oddities. Another time, I will want to ask you more, if you are willing to tell me more truth.”

“I may ask for some truth in return,” said Caleb. He lifted his arm up. Essek’s chest and neck parted and swum in the air for a moment before reforming, like oil in water. “Would you be willing to suffer through my curiosity, Herr Thelyss?”

Essek’s mouth curled. “You are full of curiosity.”

“Aren’t you too?”

“Careful, you do not know me.”

Caleb stepped back. “That is true. My mother and father taught me well to be wary of strangers. And you are as strange as they come, forgive me for saying so, Essek. I will consider your offer.”

“Wonderful.” Essek raised his hands delicately into the air, fingers poised to end the spell which connected him to Caleb’s mind. “I eagerly await your response to this offer. But—” he pointed a finger at Caleb with a sharp grin, “do be sure to knock next time you drop in. It was rather embarrassing to be caught in trance at my desk like that, as charming as you are, Mister Widogast.”

The image of the man in front of Caleb swiftly faded out of sight. It was rather anti-climactic.

Caleb was left alone in the room of dials and flickering lights and monitors again. He looked over at where he had left the printouts of LEP data. He looked down at his arm, where his sleeve was rolled up, at the red-brown hair which was slowly settling down from where it had raised over his skin.

With a snap of his fingers, Caleb brought Frumpkin through a tear in the air. The cat leapt up into his arms with a quiet meow. Caleb sat himself down and began running his hands down Frumpkin’s smooth back, feeling the rumbling purr travel through his own chest and to his still-racing heart.

He knew what he wanted to do next. It was reckless and poisonously ambitious, but he craved it.

And, to Caleb’s own surprise, he fully intended to tell Veth about this plan first. She wouldn’t like it. But it was what he needed to do to grow stronger. Not only that, but it was what he needed to do in order to protect his new friends, when there was no telling if another monster might burst through the border to Earth and wreck havoc again. This problem needed to be solved and Caleb would be the one to do it: he would offer himself to the mage Essek Thelyss.


	9. a flame which was a mockery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: some caleb-backstory-canon-typical stuff, not graphic but it does get discussed.

Caleb stood in the lounge of his apartment. He also stood in the centre of a vast spiderweb-net of arcane energy, being the heart which these arteries of magic flowed into and out and through a million times every second. He put his hand, palm up, towards the wall separating his bedroom from the lounge and spoke a Word. He pictured a neutron star, the intensity of its influence over light and space and time, its incomprehensible heaviness. He imagined the very fabric of space-time being folded in and in and in onto itself until the same bending of reality could take place right there in his living room.

The veins of magic around Caleb pulsed. Reality obeyed him.

The three other people in the room gasped as a pinprick of golden light appeared in the wallpaper by Caleb’s hand. It widened and stretched and burnt a path across the wall like a fuse until it formed the glowing outline of an arched doorway.

Caleb opened his eyes. He stepped back and swung his arm out with a smile. “Presto.”

“Can we go through?” asked Veth, cautiously approaching the glowing doorway. The other side was dark and obscured.

“ _Ja_ , of course.”

Fjord didn’t look convinced. “Are you sure we’re not going to just, I don’t know, pop out of existence if we do?”

“It is perfectly safe, I promise. I will walk through first,” offered Caleb.

He then walked through the doorway. He heard Jester gasp and Veth begin to speak, “Wait, Cal—!” before his ears popped like he’d ridden an airplane a mile into the sky and he was standing in a different room entirely.

The air was warm and smelled faintly of woodsmoke. The walls were lined with books and dried herbs and two tall windows on either side of him displayed elaborate stained-glass representations of various fairy tales he recalled from childhood. Three plush sofas sat around a roaring fire. An iron grate around the heart was worked to resemble curling vines and flowers and tiny songbirds hiding among the leaves.

A door to his left was closed, one to right opened onto a long hallway lined with more closed doors. Caleb looked up. The ceiling was high above him, and between him and the distant rafters were spiralling stairways connecting a number of other doors, more bookshelves, and little wood plank balconies holding cushioned chairs and sturdy wooden tables.

It was exactly how he had pictured it before casting. Technically, he had Essek to thank for this magic trick.

Caleb laughed to himself loudly, all alone in his pocket space, before sticking his head through the door into his apartment.

“ _Hallo_!”

The other three jumped in surprise.

“Caleb!”

“Come in, Veth! It is completely safe.”

Veth chewed her lip for only a second before grinning and rushing past Caleb. She skidded into the centre of the fireplace room, froze, gasped, and spun around in place, gaping at everything Caleb had created.

“It’s beautiful!”

“I have always dreamed of having a home like this,” said Caleb, walking over to the fireplace. A low table between the sofas held four mugs of steaming hot chocolate, as if they had been made by a real person only a minute ago. He lifted a mug up to his face and smiled as the steam fogged up his glasses. “I wanted you and the others to be as comfortable as possible, rather than be cramped up in my dingy apartment for so many weeks. It was the least I could do.”

“The least!” laughed Veth.

“Down that hallway there are four bedrooms. They are currently identical, but if there is anything you would like added or changed about this place or your bedroom, just le—”

“Caleb!” Jester and Fjord had arrived through the door. Jester was running between the walls of books with sparkling eyes, crying out, “This is amazing! Where even is this place? How did you do it? It’s so cool! Is there are a hot tub?”

“This place is actually very small,” explained Caleb, as Fjord chased Jester up the nearest stairway that wound towards the distant ceiling. “When an object is dense enough it bends space and time around it, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. That is what I have made: a very tiny bowling ball.” Caleb winced. He had never been very good at explaining complex science to other people. But Veth was watching him with intense interest. “This tower is technically embedded into the wall of my apartment and we are technically infinitely small, but the tower’s density is bending reality in such a way that I can do this…” He walked over to the closed door opposite the portal to his apartment and knocked his knuckles against the wood. Jester and Fjord paused their exploration and watched him from a balcony twenty feet up. “Would you like to see where this leads?”

Veth trotted over. “Please. I don’t know how else you can surprise me.”

With a perhaps-all-too-smug smile, Caleb pulled the door open.

The image was still blurry, but the doorway opened to another room. Caleb would make out the shape of a sofa and kitchen unit, a television, the bright squares of gabled windows, and a person leaning against the back of the sofa speaking to a second, taller person who stood nearer to the doorway.

“Ah, good,” said Caleb, with an audible dose of relief. “It worked.”

“Where is that?” asked Jester as she hurried back down to the ground floor, followed by a winded Fjord.

Veth was practically hopping up and down in place. “It’s Beau’s cabin! But that’s miles away!”

“I can make space work for me,” said Caleb. “It is funny. And a little invigorating. I could pull these two locations together as easy as folding a piece of paper. A dozen miles, a border, and a mountain or two means nothing at all once I have a grasp on how to magically manipulate the matter holding two points apart.” He paused. “And once I knew where this cabin was on an ordinance map.”

“We can walk from your living room to Beau’s, just like that?” asked Fjord.

“Ooh! It’s like teleporting but prettier,” added Jester.

“Exactly,” said Caleb. “It is for the best. Sharing information between our two households has been increasingly inefficient lately. This will make a lot of things easier for all of us.”

“I can finally hear music from the cassette player Yasha told us about!”

Jester pushed past Caleb through the doorway without another word. Fjord followed her with an apologetic glance in Caleb’s direction.

Caleb and Veth watched as the two blurry figures in the cabin startled at the unexpected visitors, then relaxed as Jester flung herself into their arms. No sound travelled through the dimly glowing doorway. But Caleb could feel the words shared in that room.

“This is immense, Caleb.”

Caleb turned back to Veth, who was staring up at the tower above them. “It was not so hard once I figured it out,” he said weakly. “I wanted a comfortable place for you and the other lost people to rest.”

“Yes...but…” She fiddled with the hem of her dress. Her dark eyes lingered on the three mugs of cocoa on the table by the fire. “This almost feels like too much. It’s like a gift I can’t hope to repay you for.”

Caleb guided her towards the plush sofas. “There was something I needed to ask of you Veth, but also I want to make it very clear that I do not wish to be repaid for this tower. It is a gift. And you are my friend.” He sat by her side.

Veth blinked at the mug of hot chocolate between her hands. “Thank you.”

“You being my friend is the best gift you can give me, Veth.”

She looked up at him. Something in her expression was unexpectedly sad, and Caleb couldn’t bear to look at it. He turned towards the fireplace and went on.

“And I will take you home once I can. As of now, I can only teleport myself to your world, and only to certain locations tied to things I am familiar with, like mental anchors. Last time I followed Essek’s magic. I don’t know yet how to open a stable portal which multiple people can travel through.”

“That’s okay. I can see you’re working very hard. I just want to help you grow in any way I can.”

“Okay… first, I need you to trust me. I have a plan, but it is dangerous, and you will probably not like it.”

“What plan?” said Beau’s voice from behind them. She stood by the doorway to her cabin.

“Welcome, Beauregard. Thank you for knocking.”

She shrugged. “Yasha and the others are listening to every song in my cassette collection. I’d rather not be pulled kicking and screaming into a dance party by Jester.”

“Isn’t this place amazing,” said Veth, leaning over the back of the sofa. “Caleb made it just for us.”

Beau looked around with a blank expression. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.” She walked over to them and flopped down on a opposite sofa. “What’re you guys talking about?”

Caleb sighed. “You should hear this too, Beauregard. I am discussing my plan to learn more complex magic.”

“Is this not complex enough,” asked Beau, motioning to the tower around them.

“Not quite. I am free styling my magic at the moment, but I need formal teaching to perform what Veth and the others require. This tower was born of my imagination. My understanding of the arcane is limited, and my imagination cannot fill in all the gaps.”

Beau’s blank expression didn’t shift. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

“Yesterday I was visited by Essek.” He watched Beau’s eyes narrow, her shoulders shift. “He only spoke to me.”

“What did he want?”

“Honestly? He wants what I want. He is unable to travel between worlds like I can. I believe this is because my understanding of the science of earth, which he has not been exposed to, grants me a wider range of abilities despite my limited familiarity with the magic of _his_ world—I am sorry. My point is that he is interested in me.”

“Oh?” Beau lifted a brow.

“Not like that. I think. He has a scientific fascination in my case, due to my magical strength. He wishes to learn more about Earth, but also about my ability to pierce the membrane of reality so easily.”

“What did you tell him?” asked Veth.

“Not much. I expressed my interest in his magic and offered an exchange of information. That is all.”

“Don’t tell me you plan to actually do that.” Beau leant forwards, bracing her elbows on her knees as she stared at Caleb. “This guy freaks me out. I haven’t even met him, and I just _know_ he’s up to something.”

“Oh, he absolutely is. But he is my best chance at learning more magic. He is very powerful, he is willing to trade information, and to be entirely frank I believe he finds me as fascinating I do him.”

“That’s a weird way to say you want to manipulate him.”

“A moment ago, you told me he freaks you out.”

“He does.”

“Then do you have any problem with me manipulating him?”

She shrugged. “I don’t like the idea of _you_ being the one to do it. You’d be bamfing over to his dark fortress for magic lessons, all on your own, in another world, with a guy who could probably turn you into a pile of smoking dust with one glance. I don’t like it.” Beau pressed her lips together and glared at the fire. He was tempted to tease her for that poorly expressed concern for his wellbeing, her clumsy attempt at protecting him, but he knew better. She was about as bad at performing friendship as he was.

“I have no better plan, Beauregard.” Caleb cleared his throat and drank from his own mug, not meeting either woman’s eyes. “I understand Essek in a way that he is not aware of. It is something I wish to take advantage of.” He paused and drank the hot chocolate, feeling the warmth bloom against his aching chest as he prepared the words in his head. “He reminds me of myself. I understand him.”

“…of yourself?” Veth tried to meet his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“For many years I was a student, and I must assume that he was too once upon a time. I was just as ravenous for knowledge as him. I hurt myself and others in that pursuit.”

The women were quiet, watching him. The fireplace muttered and hissed behind the iron grate.

“Maybe a part of me also wishes to guide him away from that hunger,” said Caleb. “The way he has spoken to me so far has been so…so artificial. He is putting up a strong and prickly front to intimidate me, seduce me, persuade me to become another device in his laboratory. But I can see somebody behind that mask, somebody desperate and lonely. Very lonely. I can see in him myself around his age.”

“How old is he?” asked Beau.

Veth hummed. “Elves in general age really slow, even slower than halflings. How old does he look to you, Caleb?”

“Perhaps his early twenties.”

“About a hundred then.”

Caleb tried not to choke on his cocoa. He saw Beau out the corner of his eye give him the smuggest grin he had seem on her yet.

“As I was saying,” muttered Caleb. “I can relate to him on some level.”

“Is this some sort of projection therapy?” asked Beau, her eyes still gleaming with self-satisfaction. “You trying to work through your own shit by playing around with this guy who reminds you of yourself?”

“Perhaps.”

“The fuck does that mean.”

“It is complicated.”

“That’s not an answer. I can tell there’s some shit you’re holding in, Caleb, and if you don’t wanna talk about it, that’s fine. But I can’t let you run off on a suicide mission in search of knowledge without knowing the whole picture.”

He laughed humourlessly. “You should know I have a spotty history with that kind of behaviour.”

“I’m all ears.”

Caleb sighed. He couldn’t bring himself to be frustrated by Beau; she was entirely justified in her suspicion. “I will tell you everything,” he said. “I can do that.”

“Only if you’re comfortable, Caleb,” said Veth.

He was quiet for a moment. “I am. With you two.” He nodded at them without meeting their eyes. “I want you to understand me and trust me, and it is true that you cannot do that if I lie to you.”

“Nothing leaves this room,” said Beau very seriously. Caleb met her eyes with a start. “I wouldn’t do that to you, or to anybody else I give a shit about.”

“Thank you, Beauregard.”

Veth put her small hand over his where it rested on the cushions between them. She smiled at him, making her round cheeks dimple, and he felt a little braver.

He pulled in a long breath and set down his empty mug. “I grew up in a very small rural town,” he began. “My parents were kind and hardworking. A baker’s assistant and a security guard. They loved me dearly and recognised my talents, but we were poor. I would have received a paltry education if I hadn’t been scouted by a prestigious university in my teens. They were in support of me taking this opportunity. They were _proud_ of me, so happy for me, even though it meant that I moved far away from them, so I had to go. Not just for them – for I believed that if I were good enough, if I became a great man, I could give them a better life…” He paused, staring at nothing. He took a shallow breath and added, “but also for me. I had to go.

“And I wasn’t alone – two others from the area came with me, although I wasn’t familiar with them before then. Together our dreams came true at that university. We studied under a leader in our field. My parents sent me letters every month telling me how _proud_ they were. Those might have been the happiest years of my life now that I look back at the beginning of it all. It was the longest time that I had ever spent away from my parents, but I found myself not minding it all that much. The _feeling_ of being surrounded by so much potential and the blistering advancement of technology and theoretical science…I…!” His hands worked in the air for a moment in silent passion before he clenched his fists and set them on his knees. “I had never felt that before. My soul was so full of light and life and the stupid youthful belief that nothing could stop me. I felt like the whole universe was opening up before me like a new book. I also fell in love, but that is beside the point.

“After a year or two that man who I mentioned, the one we studied under, he placed the three of us in an advanced class of sorts, separate from the other students. We must have been seventeen or eighteen at the time. He put us to work researching the strangest things, the most bizarre theories in several fields: special relativity, quanta, even some areas of chemistry and biology that I was not so familiar with, but my two companions were tasked with developing. He was obsessed. But we did not care, for we were the special few, the crème de la crème. Our hubris was unrivalled.” Caleb felt a smile creep across his face. He was barely aware of his audience by this point. “He told me that I may be as great as he one day. I believed him. For him, I performed nonsensical experiments. Of course, it all seemed sensible at the time.

“Sometimes he asked us to harm ourselves.” He gripped his arms, still bandaged from Frumpkin’s scratches. “He had us split our skin. Perhaps he believed there was something hidden in our blood, in the human body, which keeps us blind, keeps us from conceiving the truth of our world. We let him do this to us. We wanted to be freed.

“And for a time, we three and this madman were the only people on earth. Our studies were all that mattered, our experiments and measurements. We were told we would change the world. That the secrets we uncovered would not only make us national heroes but unshackle humanity from our simple short lives spent cowering in caves and afraid of the darkness over our heads and frightened by shadows cast on the walls.

“We spent a few years like this. I was…I think I was happy. I was – I was so alive. I held Prometheus’ flame in my hands. And…and one day I found a letter on our teacher’s desk. I had gone in there, into his study, looking for a book, a collection of essays on a new theory of dark matter – it doesn’t matter now. But when I looked in his desk, I found that letter instead. It was hidden underneath a pile of old forms. It had been opened already. It was addressed to me.”

“He had hidden it from you?” Veth asked, so quietly she was barely louder than the fireplace’s crackles.

“ _Ja_. I barely entertained that thought at the time though. That man was a god in my eyes.”

“What was this asshole’s name?” asked Beau.

“It makes no difference. He is far away, perhaps dead of old age by now. And…and I would rather not poison my tongue with his name again.” Caleb rubbed his eyes and pushed the rising tide of sickness away as he pushed on. “I saw that it was meant for me. So, I opened it. The letter was from a neighbour, back home. It was written to tell me that my mother and father were both dead. The kitchen in our home had caught fire after an electrical fault in the night, the fire had spread through the house while they slept, and they had burned alive in their own beds.”

Veth gasped. Beau only stared at him with hands knitted together so tight her knuckles turned white.

“They had died the previous spring. The letter had been written over a year before I found it.”

“He kept it for that long,” growled Beau. “He didn’t tell you.”

“No. He did not.”

“Did you quit?”

Caleb laughed drily. “No, technically. I did not make it quite that far. I confronted our teacher and asked him why he had hidden this from me. He told me it was for my own good. It would have only distracted me. My poor and simple parents were not so important to take me from our—from his work. I was already so full of grief at the time, I could barely think straight, only enough to ask him that one question. But in that moment, I realised I was not a victim of his cruelty. I couldn’t blame only him.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Beau unfolded her hands and leant in, clearly still processing his previous monologue. Caleb envied her. She thought too highly of him.

“I had been just as obsessed as he. I had been equally unkind. For two years I hadn’t spared a single thought towards my parents. I did not notice that they had stopped sending me letters from home, or perhaps I did notice, and I simply did not care. I did not care enough to send a letter back during my tutelage. I did not care about my mother and father enough to take a single train journey home to check on them after their silence. Not even once. Because I was obsessed. And after realising this, I broke, a little. I do not remember much of this, but I could no longer attend my lessons or work in the laboratories. I don’t think I could be around other people, not even my two good friends from home, without hurting them or myself. I was institutionalised soon after.”

When he spared a nervous glance towards Veth, she was gripping the hem of her dress with wet eyes. He wanted to smile at her. He wanted to hold her and apologise for scaring her, upsetting her, making her cry. He bit his lip and turned back to the fire.

“For some years I was in a hospital of sorts. I only remember some of it. When I finally recovered, I only wanted to run away, so far away now that I could take care of myself once more. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to forget. I wanted to die. In the end I settled for running West. Amazingly, the border had relaxed while I was asleep.” He chuckled. “That was just what it felt like to me. Like sleeping beauty waking up after a hundred years had passed. My teacher was right; the world _had_ been changed. Everything was different and I was still the same. I am still the same. The most I could do was run away from my sins and make a new life for myself in the West.”

“That’s not true,” cried Veth. Her voice cracked and wobbled with emotion. “You’re kind. You’re so kind, Caleb, look at where we are right now. You _have_ changed since then and I can see it _so_ clearly.”

Neither Caleb nor Beau responded. After a moment Caleb went on,

“I never contacted my old teacher or my two old friends again. I changed my name. I attended my second university. I finally got my doctorate. Five years ago, I moved from Germany to Switzerland and began working at CERN as a particle physicist. That is where my story ends, for now.”

Veth gently put her hand over Caleb’s. Her tucked her little fingers under his palm and slowly rubbed her thumb over the back of his hand, trying to meet his eyes.

“I am so sorry you went through that,” she told him. “You didn’t deserve that. Any of it.”

Caleb stared at his hand in hers.

“I can tell that you blame yourself, maybe even for their deaths on some level, but please know that I don’t feel the same way, Caleb. You’re not a bad man.”

“You can believe what you want. The truth is that I crumbled under my own selfishness and I am still a little broken.” He looked away from their hands to put a hand over the edge of the sofa and snap his fingers, summoning Frumpkin. The cat smoothly leapt up onto his lap and began its gentle purr against his ribcage. “Parts of me are still desperate for knowledge and notoriety, as if it could still make my parents proud,” he said, running his shaking fingers through Frumpkin’s fur. “There is still that cursed hunger in me which drove me mad.”

“It doesn’t have to be a curse,” Beau said suddenly. She was staring at Caleb with an unreadable expression. “You can be hungry for knowledge and for an understanding of the mechanics of reality without letting it become an obsession. You don’t need to go mad.”

“I wish that were the case,” he sighed. “I hope it is the case for Essek. I see him following the same path, all alone like I was. A large part of me wishes he could have what I did not.”

“Then do it,” said Beau. Caleb looked up at her with a start. She leant back and folded her arms. “If you think he deserves it, give it a shot. And besides, I believe you deserve an education that you’ll have some control over this time around.”

“You’re supporting my plan?”

“Sure.”

Veth squeezed his hand. “I’ll support you too,” she said, “so long as you don’t put yourself into any unnecessary danger. If you get even the slightest sense this Essek guy is gonna take advantage of you and imprison you or experiment on you or anything like that, get out.” She lightly jabbed a finger into his chest for emphasis, making him smile. “Get out, you hear me? Come home.”

“I will, Veth. I promise. I will not make you cry again if I can help it.”

* * *

The strange pocket-space that Caleb had fashioned into a home was nice, but Beau didn’t understand why she should move into it like Jester and Fjord and Veth already had. Her cabin was fine. She liked her own bed and her own living room with the view over the mountainside and her wine cupboard and cassette player.

She had spent one evening in Caleb’s tower with everyone else, eating remarkably good food that had been fabricated by Caleb’s magic, before returning through the doorway into her home (when she looked back at where she came there was only a dull door-shaped golden line in the wall of her cabin). Caleb, Veth, Jester, and Fjord all retired to their respective rooms in the tower that night. Beau began her evening routine in the cabin.

There was a snowstorm outside. The wind growled down the chimney and thick curtains of snow blinded the windows.

She had finished brushing her teeth when she heard footsteps in the other room. Beau stuck her head out of the bathroom to see Yasha changing into nightwear by the sofa.

Beau washed her face and left the bathroom. The pile of blankets that Yasha slept under on the floor looked about as thin as usual.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather sleep in the room Caleb made for you?”

Yasha looked up from her hands with a start. She was partway through buttoning-up the pyjama blouse Beau had bought for her two weeks ago. It had ridiculous little cartoonish fruit and vegetables printed all over it. “Oh. No. Well, I mean that I don’t mind sleeping here, on the floor.”

“You could’ve…I dunno, slept on the floor in your room in the tower,” Beau pointed out.

Yasha’s eyes suddenly darted around the room, her cheeks darkened. “Oh, um, I’m sorry. If you would rather that I not sleep in your cabin anymore I can—uh, I’m sorry—”

“No!” said Beau a little forcefully. She laughed shakily. “I don’t mean that. I like…uh, I don’t mind you sleeping here. I just mean that, you know, there’s nothing keeping you here rather than there.”

Yasha looked at Beau. Her wildflower eyes seemed brighter in the dark than possible. “I like being in this cabin with you,” she said simply.

“Oh.”

“And I am used to it. I might not sleep as well in the tower.”

“I see.”

“You really don’t mind me staying with you?”

“No. But are you sure you’re comfortable down there, on the floor? You’re not gonna be cold at all in the night? There’s a snowstorm.”

Yasha shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“Sleep in my room.”

Beau had said it before realising the words were leaving her mouth. She snapped her jaw closed and waited, glowing with embarrassment.

“Oh…okay.”

“It’s warmer in there,” said Beau, almost a whisper. “But there isn’t much space, you know, it’s a small room. But it’s warm.”

Fortunately, from some perspectives, Beau’s bed was large enough for two. They lay back-to-back, sharing the mattress and heavy duvet in the dark. Beau stared dizzily at the nearest wall as she felt Yasha shift behind her.

Yasha was broader than Beau. With every movement Beau felt herself be pushed subtly around the bed while Yasha found a comfortable position under the duvet.

“How’s this?” asked Beau.

“Good. I am very comfortable. Thank you, Beau.”

Beau smiled in the dark. Now that Yasha was settled she felt herself sink into the beginning of a comfortable sleepiness with Yasha’s warmth pressed to her back.

“Caleb told me his plan to figure out how to make portals for you and the others,” said Beau with a yawn. “It’s a stupid plan and it’s probably gonna get him killed, but I think it’s the best we got right now. As for us, I guess we’ll just keep an eye on the lottery numbers in case anyone else decides to pay Earth a visit.”

Yasha was quiet.

“He’s gonna become that elf guy’s student for a while. Maybe he’ll pick up enough training to figure out how to make a proper portal to your planet.”

“Exandria.”

“Right. Are you from near where Veth is from?”

“No. Far east of her hometown.”

“Shit. Caleb will have to make at least two portals in that case, huh.” Beau shuffled around to pull the duvet closer to her chin. She closed her eyes. “I’ll make sure to check where Jester and Fjord are from tomorrow. They were travelling together when they fell through, so they shouldn’t mind hopping back over together too. And I’ll tell Caleb you’re from the East.”

Beau went quiet. The sound of Yasha’s breathing and her weight and warmth beckoned Beau deeper into the dark tides of sleep that began to wash over her with each deep inhale.

After a few minutes, Yasha’s voice abruptly pulled Beau back to wakefulness.

“You don’t need to tell Caleb,” she said softly.

“Hm? Why not?” Beau asked, her voice thickened by lethargy. She fought the urge to roll onto her back and face Yasha, to see what story her face told. They remained back-to-back as they spoke.

“Don’t tell him I need my own portal. It’s okay.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem. He likes to show off, clearly,” she said with a quiet snort.

She heard Yasha chuckle. “That is true. But…” Yasha was quiet for a moment, but perfectly still. “…The truth is I don’t need a portal, Beau.”

Beau waited. She listened.

“I don’t want to go back. I would rather stay here.”

“Oh. Do you…do you want to tell me why?”

Yasha sighed. “Not now. I would rather you sleep for now.”

“That’s okay.” Beau waited for more, before adding, “I’m good at keeping secrets, by the way. I take that shit seriously. And if you’re, like, in danger? If you’re running from something, I respect that. But if someone’s after you, I’ll beat the shit out of them, if you want.”

Yasha laughed again. It was such a gentle noise, a soft and melancholic sound that rippled through the point where they touched, blooming through Beau’s own chest like a sunrise.

“Thank you, Beau.”

“And you can stay with me for as long as you like.”

“Thank you.”

“Goodnight.”

“Thank you. Goodnight.”


	10. a selfish prayer for light

Beau wanted to watch Caleb as he cast the spell. She told him she was there to make sure he didn’t make a mistake and accidentally teleport himself into the wall of his apartment or something, but he sensed there was more to it. She sat perched on the back of his sofa, bare feet on the cushions, next to Frumpkin, who watched Caleb with an almost identical stare of intense interest.

“If all goes right,” Caleb said, staring back at Beau as he raised his hands, “you will see very little. It will look like I am simply standing here, talking to myself.”

“ _If_ it goes right,” she echoed, pointing at him. “You’ve copied this spell from him, yeah? It’s just like when I tried to copy this one girl’s skateboard trick just by watching her do it once. I fucking broke my ankle.”

“I am aware of the risks, Beauregard. I am aware that you are concerned for my safety. I am also aware that the real reason you are here is to make sure I do not hide any information I might glean from this conversation from you.” He raised his brow. “Now, shall I begin?”

She crossed her arms and grinned at him with a remarkably carnivorous delight. “Hell yeah.”

Caleb closed his eyes. He pictured the chalkboard, the now-familiar runes and numbers that marked the roads through magic and the membranes between worlds. He recalled the feeling that was left on his skin when he tried to touch Essek’s projection in the monitor room. He recalled the cinnamon-sweet smell which seemed to follow that man around.

The theory of this spell was much simpler than the teleport’s. There was no danger of Caleb slipping on his route and landing in the wrong place or time. He could instead just jettison his mind, temporarily, to where Essek was at that precise moment in time, for a few minutes.

So, Caleb reached out to his target through the nets of light and cascading rivers of potential which lay beyond reality.

Almost immediately, he found Essek. His mind was bright, like the north star in a partly clouded sky, and Caleb found himself sliding out of his body and away towards that bead of familiar intellect quicker than he had expected. He slipped past the membrane between worlds and fell faster, faster, and faster still, until that tiny star became a beacon.

Caleb stood in the centre of a large, grey-walled room. It looked a little like the inside of a cathedral. On all sides of him were rows of seats climbing up like a conference hall, where a dozen or so people sat scattered around, all dressed in a variation of a dark blue or white uniform. They were all dark elves and were all looking at Caleb.

But they weren’t, as Caleb realised once he looked to his left and saw Essek standing from his seat and addressing the gathered assembly of people. He wore something like what Caleb had seen him in last: a long dark blue robe that brushed the floor and concealed his body. But on his shoulders was a broad silver mantle which rose from his shoulders in twin reflective barbs.

“…but I must remind you all,” Essek was saying, “they are not fools. I am certain that what spies they may have in our Dynasty have already spread news of this plan back home to their king.”

Essek fell quiet as somebody across the room replied to him. Caleb couldn’t hear the response; the sound of that person’s voice was muffled, like he was hearing them speak from the other side of a thick brick wall. But Essek’s voice was clear when he spoke again.

“I will. My colleagues have already begun a fresh investigation.”

He paused again.

“Exactly. Thank you for your ear.”

Essek sat down on his seat, smoothing the fabric of his robes.

No longer paying any attention to the continuing discussion taking place elsewhere in the hall, Caleb moved closer to Essek. He paused two steps away and watched Essek’s face carefully. The man seemed focussed, well-mannered unlike anything Caleb had witnessed of him so far, and even a little bored. He was toying with a thin white-gold ring around his right thumb.

Caleb took a step to his right, sliding into Essek’s field of view.

Essek’s blue-purple eyes snapped up to him. Impressively, his face barely shifted in reaction to Caleb’s arrival. He said nothing.

“ _Guten Tag_. I learned a new trick.”

The corners of Essek’s mouth might have lifted by a fraction, but it could have been Caleb’s nervous imagination.

“I am aware that I have caught you at an awkward time. I apologise for this sincerely, Herr Thelyss, but I have only a short message to deliver to you. Might I have your, ah, your attention for just a moment?”

Essek’s eyes moved away from Caleb towards another point in the room. With lips pressed tight together, he nodded stiffly and rose to his feet.

“Ah, I see,” said Caleb with an easy smile. “You are popular, no?”

“My studies are private and highly confidential, my lady. If you insist on an official description of my current prerogative you must speak to Her Majesty yourself. I am not of the privilege to divulge this information to you. My apologies.” Essek fell silent as he listened to the woman’s response but kept one pointed ear distinctly angled towards where Caleb’s projection stood by his side.

“To make this short and sweet,” said Caleb, “I am here to amend my offer from before. Rather than, what was it I asked for before, ah…truth? Rather than that quite amorphous and blasphemous thing, I ask simply that you take me under your wing as an informal student of yours in the arcane arts. In return I will tell you anything you wish about my world. I know a fair amount about the science of Earth, and, to my downfall, I would love to explore these matters with someone of equal intelligence.”

Caleb watched with satisfaction as a smile crept across Essek’s face.

“What say you, Thelyss?”

Essek was quiet for another second or two. Almost imperceptibly, he raised a hand from under the folds of his robes and lifted the tips of two fingers towards Caleb. It looked a little like a foreign hand sign, which Caleb had no chance of understanding. Essek held this motion towards Caleb for a few more seconds.

Finally, he lowered his hand and said aloud, “I agree entirely with your proposal. I will begin preparations as soon as I am able. Please update me on this matter by tomorrow morning.”

Essek lowered himself to his seat without another word. He glanced at where Caleb stood, shining with barely concealed pride, and flashed a bright smile his way.

“You are a smart one.” Caleb couldn’t help himself from an identical grin. “Thank you for your patience and for your generosity.” He bowed, hoping dimly that this gesture translated better than Essek’s hand motion had. “I will see you soon. Until then.”

Caleb straightened up, raising his hands to dispel his projection, and met Essek’s bright eyes one last time. He felt _watched_ more intensely than ever before.

The spell snapped like a thread. Caleb felt the recoil of his magic yank him back through the membrane, along the path he had mapped to reach Essek, all the way home in less than a second. The grey walls of his apartment wobbled into focus before Caleb, along with Beau who watched him with an unblinking stare, Frumpkin, and a pounding headache.

Caleb groaned and staggered over to the sofa, landing on the cushions next to Beau’s legs. “I may have stuck around too long,” he muttered, massaging his temple. “That was quite the strain.”

“He agreed though, right? That’s what it sounded like on my end.”

“ _Ja_. He seemed eager.”

“Cool.” Beau slid down from the back of the sofa to sit next to him. She lightly punched his shoulder. “Good job. You were pretty smooth in there.”

Caleb laughed weakly. “It was hard to tell if he found my charade amusing or convincing or offensive. He was in a meeting, you see. He couldn’t organically respond to me.”

“Whatever. The point still stands; you did good. You held it together.”

She was looking at him in a way Caleb didn’t know how to react to. He suspected she wanted him to accept the compliment. “…thank you, Beauregard. And thank you for being here for this.”

She slapped him on the back hard enough to make him wheeze before getting to her feet. “You’re not useless, Widogast! Just a coward. You’re not as lame as you seem once you get over yourself.”

“Strangely, coming from you that is high praise.”

The rest of the day Caleb was highly occupied by his overactive imagination. Sitting as his desk and dully monitoring the LEP tests, the hours felt too long, every second scraped past slower and slower, while Caleb mentally compiled his list of interests and requests. He wished to first ask Essek about the history of magic in his world, then some basic theory, then perhaps a new spell or two. The extent of their first lesson would likely depend on how valuable Essek found Caleb’s reciprocal offer.

For this Caleb took some pleasure in imagining what Essek would like to learn about Earth. Once home from the labs, he took a book on world history from his shelves. It was thick and hardbacked. Many of the pages were creased and stained with inky fingerprints or partially torn from hurried page-flipping. Caleb wished he had an edition in better shape, but he was overly fond of this copy. He believed it a good start.

When he asked Beau for a suggestion to compliment the history book, she was severely unhelpful.

“Is the book not enough already?”

“Perhaps not. I am anticipating him placing a high value on further teaching, so I would like a second offer just in case.”

Glowing with sweat, on her fifty-something push-up in the middle of the tower’s main room, and carrying a cross legged Jester on her back, Beau was still able to fix Caleb with an impressively pointed stare. “You don’t wanna give him too much. We discussed this.”

“ _Ja_ , and I plan not to.” Caleb paced the perimeter of the room. He felt like a teenager planning his first date; he wasn’t sure where the lines lay, what was too much, what was too little. He wanted to make a good impression. “Maybe I will bring a photograph of the city. He might appreciate that.”

“Oh!” Jester emerged from behind her notebook. “You could bring him some pastries! He’ll love that, I’m _sure_.”

Caleb paused by the two girls. Beau continued her push-ups, Jester smiled expectantly up at him while periodically rising and falling in time with Beau’s grunts. “Pastries?”

“This might not be a time for pastries,” said Fjord from his seat by the fire. He was polishing that silver longsword of his. “This man Caleb has spoken about might prefer more cold-hard information, not desserts.” He looked up with a crooked smile. “No offence, Jester.”

Jester grinned back at him. “But it _is_ information, _Fjord_. Caleb will be giving him an experience, you see. The pastries here are super good! They’re almost as good as the stuff you can get in Nicodranas and there are some flavours that don’t even exist in our world. He’ll learn so much from eating a cupcake made in Switch-Land his mind will be super-duper blown.” She closed her notebook and deftly hopped down from Beau’s back and hurried to where her bag and coat lay in a pile on the sofa. She dug around for a moment, saying, “I got a big box this morning from my favourite pastry shop yet that Veth has taken me to in this city. I’m going to keep most of these for myself of course but…here!”

She produced a small cupcake. The icing was a bright unnatural blue and topped by a yellow-petalled sugar flower. Jester held it out to Caleb.

“This is a vanilla cupcake,” she told him soberly. “We don’t have vanilla in our world.”

Caleb gingerly took the cake from her hand. “You don’t?”

“Nope! I’m gonna be super sad when we go home, and I’ll never be able to have a vanilla cupcake again. Now that I think about it…oh man.” Jester unsteadily walked over to Fjord and flopped down on the floor by his feet. “…Maybe I can ask the traveller to teach me how to fabricate vanilla. Maybe…”

Caleb stared at the cupcake in his hands. He had no other ideas at the time and had been a little swayed by Jester’s argument. Perhaps he was allowed an ounce of whimsy.

That was how Caleb came to arranging himself the following morning in his apartment with his satchel over one shoulder, containing everything he suspected he would need for study as well as a book on world history and a small vanilla cupcake, prepared to jump across the boundaries between worlds.

Veth took his hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Caleb nodded. “I will do my best.” He made eye-contact with Beau, leaning against the wall by the door to his tower. “And I will keep a very close eye on our new friend. Do not think that I am not still afraid of him. I very much am.”

Both Veth and Beau seemed pleased. Veth stepped back and clasped her hands over her chest.

“And remember,” added Beau, “you see anything lying around written in his language that he won’t show you – Undercommon, was that it? whatever – you commit that shit to memory. Stick it in your nerd brain bank, bring it back to me, let me translate it.”

“Understood, Beauregard.” He gave her a playful little salute, making her smile, before closing his eyes and summoning the chalkboard.

The experience of travelling towards Essek was noticeably easier that second time. As if the path through the woods had been worn down a little by Caleb’s passage, he found no trouble locating his target. He barely even had to think about the arrangement of numbers and runes.

On his way, Caleb did not fail to notice a second time the tears, like rips in fabric, in the membrane. He was not the one leaving these holes. His teleportation brought him along threads which wove this wall between worlds together; there was something else responsible. He decided to put this curiosity behind him for the time being, thinking it could be a question to pose to Essek during a later lesson.

Caleb landed in a vast library. The walls rose up around him like the trunks of giant trees lined by hundreds upon hundreds of books. The air was heavy with the smell of old paper, old ink, old knowledge, that faint perfume of cinnamon from before, and was thick with the unmistakable power that all libraries held. There were a number of desks in the room, all unoccupied, a pair of bookwheels at opposite ends of the library, and one large stained-glass window in the far wall. The stained-glass depicted iconography Caleb was not familiar with: dark hands reaching for a bright star-like shape, a twelve-sided box surrounded by stars, a tall woman seated in a throne. Light was shed on the long room by the window and by glowing crystal sconces set along the walls.

Caleb approached the nearest bookwheel. He gently pushed the paddle near the floor with his foot until the first open book rotated into view. It was written in Undercommon, but one page depicted something resembling a distillation method.

“Already so curious.”

Caleb turned towards the voice in time to see Essek close a door to the library behind him.

“I meant no offense,” said Caleb, turning his back on the bookwheel. “I have not mastered the precision of my arrival, so landed in this room alone, and became distracted. It is hard to ignore your texts. They are beautiful.”

“No offence has been taken.” Essek drifted over to join Caleb by the books. He sent a glance at the text Caleb had been looking at and smiled. “I did not take you for one interested in the study of elixirs.”

“Oh. I am not. I must admit I cannot read your alphabet.”

Essek blinked at Caleb. “I see. That will be…hm, quite the barrier to your learning if we are to begin your tutelage together. We could work around this in a number of ways.”

“Such as?”

“The slow and painful solution would be of course for you to learn Undercommon. But I assume you have not the patience for this route.”

Caleb chuckled. “I do love languages. I am a quick learner when it comes to them. But _ja_ , I am eager.”

“Then we could simply omit the reading of any texts written in anything but Common, the language we are speaking now.”

Caleb tipped his head carefully, folding his hands behind his back. “That seems counter-productive, does it not? We are here to conduct an honest and equivalent trade of information.”

“You are correct.” A sharp smile spread across Essek’s face as he took a step back and drew his hands from within the shadows of his cloak. He arranged his fingers between them, like he was about to conduct an orchestra, and delicately raised one white brow. “I am about to cast a spell on you. It will allow you to read my texts no matter the language. Do not be alarmed.”

“Go ahead.”

It shouldn't have surprised Caleb that Essek hid his hands from sight behind his cloak as he cast the spell. But it stung a little; evidently this was not one of the spells which Essek intended to teach Caleb in their first session together. Perhaps Caleb could earn this one at a later date.

From there, Caleb had no trouble following the writings Essek brought before him. Even if written in the alien Undercommon they were as clear to him as if they were written in German.

Essek had sat him behind a long table in the library carved from dark purple wood. He floated to and from the walls of books, in and out of the room, fetching various texts and scrolls, telling Caleb to read them all. So, Caleb read it all. He hadn’t felt such a vivacity to read and to learn for over a decade. The feeling scared him a little, like the first plunge of a rollercoaster, but wouldn’t have considered stopping. It felt too good.

The first few hours constituted a beginner’s class on magic. Caleb was aware of his unfamiliarity with the fundamentals and the importance of their teaching, but it nevertheless frustrated him to be dragged through the tedium of simple arcane theory. It all made so much sense to him, despite its newness, that he almost wanted to kick himself.

He learnt about the different types of magic, its sources, its history. He learnt a few important historical names. He even learnt the nature of some of his accidental casting.

“A bird?”

“A falcon, to be precise. I was under a large amount of stress and wished to escape, and then… _poosh_ ,” said Caleb, imitating a small explosion with his hands. “A falcon.”

Essek looked thoughtful. “The incident with the buttons, then this. You have a knack for transmutation. It is one of the more philosophically intriguing schools of magic and the most imaginative, in my opinion. But it is not my bailiwick.” He flicked a finger and the book on basic arcane theory closed itself and drifted from the table towards its home among the dark stacks. “What was the next spell you cast.”

“Oh. That would have been…” Caleb rubbed his thumb over his chin in thought. He hadn’t prepared to perform magic before Essek in their first class. “I summoned a friend.”

“A friend?”

Caleb reached back in his skull towards the little mental inch which kept Frumpkin tethered to his own soul. There was a feeling of unravelling, then an orange-furred cat appeared on the desk between him and Essek. Frumpkin sat and curled his tail around his little orange paws.

“His name is Frumpkin. He drinks milk when I tell him to.”

Essek tapped his chin and inspected the cat. “A familiar. A simple spell, one often disregarded by more powerful spellcasters.”

“Do you have a familiar?”

Essek blinked at him. “No. I have never wanted for one. Do you find this…Frumpkin to be useful?”

“ _Ja_ , I suppose so,” mused Caleb, reaching out to pull Frumpkin into his lap. The cat immediately began purring and rubbing its face against Caleb’s stomach. “He keeps me company. He keeps me calm when I become overwhelmed. And on a few occasions, he has assisted me with my spells.” He paused. “I don’t think I can imagine being without him now if I am being honest.”

Essek rose from his seat. “Speaking of which, I recall you mentioning you have had trouble focussing your spell-craft and keeping your ability under control when you need it to be. This is an easy fix.”

Caleb watched the man drift into another room, then reappear a moment later with some small objects in his hands. Essek laid his delivery out before Caleb on the desk. There were three wax candles of differing heights, a leather pouch, a book, and a small leather case closed by a silver latch.

“These candles,” said Essek, “will allow you to clear your mind of…unnecessary worry while focussing on magic. Light them while studying or while casting a particularly complex spell.”

Caleb leant in to sniff the closest candle. It smelled of cinnamon, the same scent that had hung around Essek since they first met.

“This pouch contains a number of components. None are innately magical, but if you keep them on your person the likelihood of a spell you may cast going haywire is far slimmer. This book is empty. Use the writing supplies found inside this case to write any spell notation you learn within the pages of the book. I need not explain to you why recording your magical knowledge is important, do I, mister Widogast?”

Caleb chuckled. “Of course not. But I am overwhelmed by your generosity.”

“These are simple supplies,” he said, waving a hand. “It should be well within your power to pay me back in equal sum.”

It occurred to Caleb that he had payment in the satchel by his feet; he had shamefully forgotten about it in his passion to read and learn.

He pulled out the book on history and placed it on the desk by the candles. “This book contains a truncated history of my planet. You will learn the most important periods and events going back about six hundred years, and a description of many civilizations which have fallen or survived to the present day.”

Essek pulled the book closer to himself. He ran his hands over the well-worn cover, before noticing the dog-ears and scrap paper bookmarks peeking out from between the pages. “How long have you had this book?”

“A good few years. It is one of my favourites.”

“Then I promise to return it.” Caleb stared at Essek, who smiled in return with his hand resting on the cover. “I am familiar with the feeling of loving a book like a friend, because you have spent so much time with it. I would not make you part with one so important.”

Rather than configure a response or spend another moment meeting those purple eyes which suddenly seemed to glow with a profound kindness, Caleb ducked back under the desk to retrieve another item from his satchel. He brought out a little paper box.

“I was convinced by a friend to give you this,” he said, holding the box out to Essek. “You need not accept it.”

Curiously, Essek took the box from Caleb. He opened it, meeting Caleb’s eyes with a curious smirk, and looked inside. He laughed. “A dessert of your world, I assume?”

“It is called a cupcake. It is very sweet.” Caleb watched nervously as Essek held the little pastry in his hand. “Forgive me if this is a silly thing for me to give you, it was an impulse.”

To Caleb’s horror Essek took a bite out of the cupcake.

“Hm.” Essek’s expression froze as he chewed the cake, staring at an oblique spot in the middle distance. He swallowed. “I do not hate this.”

“It’s not too sweet?”

Essek met his eyes. “No. The taste is curious.”

“It is vanilla.”

Essek took a second bite and put the half-eaten cupcake down. “The food of your world is strange,” he said around his mouthful. “A lot of art and flavour in just a little dessert. You must all be hedonists.”

Something occurred to Caleb. He raised a hand and pointed two fingers towards Essek in the way he recalled Essek had done during their previous conversation.

“What does this mean,” he asked, wiggling his hand in the air. “You did this towards me when I was projecting that day, but I don’t understand it. It is not a gesture I am familiar with.”

Essek blinked, then his face broke into a smile. There were blue crumbs on his chin. “It means something along the lines of ‘ _please wait, I am thinking_ ’ or ‘ _don’t interrupt my silence_ ’. It is a rather specific message, but an important one.” He laughed that unexpectedly bright laugh from before. “Is that not something your culture cares to convey to one another?”

“Oh, I guess not. We tend to say those things aloud.”

“How rude.”

Emboldened by the success of his cupcake, Caleb suggested that Essek put him to the test. He let Essek interpret this suggestion however he wished to.

After the candles and other gifts had been cleared away Essek presented a book which appeared to describe some basic spells. It reminded Caleb of a beginner’s instructional manual. Essek flipped to a page illustrated by calculations which immediately captivated Caleb. The style of the spell was simple yet elegant, new to him and practically fizzing with potential. He caught himself leaning over the table towards the page.

“Hold this.”

Essek’s voice snapped him out of the stupor. He took the offered object: a small piece of crumbly yellow rock.

“Now read the spell.” Essek tapped the page, walking around the table to stand next to Caleb. “It will allow you to conjure a small flame. You should have no trouble with this spell, it is far simpler than what you have already proved you are capable of. But it is useful in many situations. Combative, utility, experimental, even just lighting a candle…” Essek went on.

Caleb barely listened. His eyes scanned the page, memorising the series and combination of numbers, the simple elegance of it, how it bound and balanced the three vital components needed to complete the equation: the fuel, the heat, and oxygen in the room around him. It made such beautiful sense to him.

Spellbound himself, Caleb identified the oxygen in the air directly above his hand holding the small lump of sulphur. He redirected some of the magic, which had already begun to hum like static energy beneath his skin, out from his fingertips. He instructed the air around the sulphur to heat. He demanded it boil, until the loose strands of his magic ignited. He pulled the bubbles of pure oxygen closer. He watched as five tiny flames grew from his fingers like orange petals.

In less than a second, those five flames grew until Caleb held a small inferno in the palm of his hand. At the very centre of the fire sat the lump of sulphur like a bright white heart.

“…impressive,” breathed Essek.

Caleb didn’t looked away from the fire. He was aware of Essek standing next to him. Essek may have even been speaking to him, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He was staring at the fire in his hand.

There were many things which frightened Caleb and he was well familiar with the emotion. What he felt when he looked at the fire flowing out of his skin was not fear, it was a sour kind of loathing. It seeped out of him and turned his skin and mind pitch black and crawled across the floor and walls until he stood in nothing but dark. The feeling roared in his ears. It chewed at his throat. It raked black claws across his eyes until his cheeks were wet and his mouth gaped in disgust.

The fire was growing bigger. A small and shrunken part of Caleb wondered if it was growing in his hand or growing in his mind. Either way, he no longer had control over it, so there was no use wondering.

Suddenly the flame was gone. Essek was holding Caleb’s wrists with an iron grip and trying to meet his eyes.

“Caleb? Can you hear me?”

Caleb blinked. He felt tears dribble from his chin.

“Are you hurt?”

Caleb shook his head and pulled his hands free. He gruffly wiped his face dry with the back of his sleeve. “No.”

Essek was watching him with a strange expression. Caleb didn’t like imagining what the man was thinking.

“I dispelled the flame,” said Essek carefully. “You did no harm, no damage. In fact, Caleb, your spell-work was very graceful.”

Caleb grabbed his satchel. His hands were shaking as he slung the bag over his shoulder and combed sooty fingers through his hair. “I-I should go. Goodbye. Sorry.”

As Caleb began casting the spell which would return him home, Essek slid into view. His expression was pained.

“You need not explain your…reason for reacting as you did. I assure you that you have not offended me.”

“That is good to know,” muttered Caleb, tracing his coordinates in the air. “I appreciate your courtesy, but I must go.” As he neared the end of the equation, Caleb’s eyes lingered on the palms of his hands. There were mild burns beginning to show around the base of his fingers. The skin was red and white in places, threating to peel and blister, angry but curiously numb. He blinked and cleared his throat. “I look forwards to our next meeting.”

As Caleb cast the spell and his magic began to unravel Essek appeared to open his mouth, but Caleb didn’t hear his voice before vanishing from the room.

* * *

The bedroom that Caleb had made for Beau in his inter-dimensional tower was nice; she had to admit it. The bed was draped in sky-blue fabrics and its mattress was soft, so soft she felt like she was sinking as she lay on it. There was a low bookshelf, empty, and cushioned chair by a small fireplace in the far wall. Like every other room in the tower there were no windows. Frankly, it was _too_ comfortable. Beau preferred firm beds and simple lodgings, perhaps a habit that her military training had instilled in her against all odds. However, when Beau had stuck her head into each of their rooms on the way to her own, she’d found that Jester and Fjord and Veth appeared to have fallen in love with the tower’s furnishings and had begun to personalise their respective rooms further.

Jester had accumulated a shocking number of stuffed animals, dreamcatchers, lava lamps, giant beanbags, fairy lights, and other glittering miscellanea in her room. Fjord had been less active. When Beau had passed his room, she’d noticed only a few books, a single lava lamp, and a potted plant that hadn’t been there before. Besides, he seemed to spend more nights in Jester’s room than his own.

Veth’s room was messy, full of notes and technological gore taken from Caleb’s apartment. There was a single clockwork toy set on the table by her bed. It looked like a little metal soldier.

But still, Beau couldn’t feel comfortable in the tower. It felt too much like an in-between place, like a train station, not somewhere she could sit still.

She lay on her bed in her room in the tower and thought about what Yasha had said to her last night. Yasha hadn’t brought it up again the next morning. Beau didn’t want to pry too soon. But she wanted to know the truth – she itched for it like she always did.

Beau sighed and rolled onto her stomach. The sheets smelled like clean lavender and soap. The night that she had slept next to Yasha was too real, almost unimaginably so, that the memory of Yasha’s body so close to her own sent waves of hot anxiety through her chest. She pressed her knuckles to her heart and groaned into the pillow.

There was a knocking at the door.

“Beau?”

Beau lifted her head. “Jester?”

“Are you naked?”

“No.”

Jester stuck her head between the door and doorway. She was wearing a sweet rainbow-striped sweater and pink corduroy trousers. There was snow still melting in her dark hair. “Fjord and Veth are out. Are you busy too?”

Like usual, Beau hadn’t kept track of where Yasha would be that day. She assumed she would want her space after the intimacy of last night. As for Caleb, Beau didn’t expect him back until the evening.

“I’m not busy,” she answered, sitting up on the bed. “Do need something?”

Jester shrugged and slipped into the bedroom. Beau spotted a glittery pink headband in Jester’s hair; it was almost unfair how she made the goofiest fashion look so good. “I’m just a little lonely, that’s all. Can I draw you?”

Beau was still blinking and stuttering when Jester planted herself at the other end of the bed, cross legged, and brought out a book and pencil. “Uh, I guess?”

“Great! Just sit there, please,” said Jester, already quickly moving the pencil across the page. “I’ve drawn Veth already, and Caleb’s always running about and doing stuff and teleporting away to hang out with the hot elf guy, so I gotta draw you, Beau.”

“You gotta?”

“Yep.” Jester wasn’t lifting her pencil or eyes from the page. “This trip is the most fun I’ve _ever_ had. And I bet you guys will be our friends for ever and ever, because we get along so well, you know?”

“Do you have many other friends besides Fjord?”

Beau hadn’t meant the question to be so blunt. She only meant to confirm a suspicion. To her credit, Jester didn’t flinch and when she answered her voice was as bright as always.

“Not really. Me and Fjord have known each other for months. We first met when both of us were alone and travelling in search of…things. Neither of us had anybody else at the time.”

“What about family?”

“My mama is at home. She couldn’t come with me, you see. I was looking for my dad and, oh! We found him!” She looked up from the page for a moment to flash a brilliant grin. “He wasn’t what I was expecting, but you know, I’m glad I got to meet my dad anyway. Fjord’s an orphan. _He_ didn’t know what he was looking at all for until we met Caduceus. Caddy helped us both out a lot, and he travelled with us for a while before he had to go do other stuff for _his_ family. I wonder what he’s up to now…”

Beau rested her chin on her fist and watched Jester’s hands dance across the drawing, hidden from this angle. “So, you’ve got people you wanna return to, like Veth?”

“Of course.” Jester scoffed, her round cheeks dimpling. “This world is cool and all, but I don’t like hiding all the time.” She paused her drawing to gesture down at herself. “Aren’t these clothes super cute? Don’t they look way better on me when I’m _me_ than they do when I’m a human? No offence, of course.”

Beau laughed. “Totally. You wear it better than most humans can anyway.”

“I’m gonna go home to my mama, ‘cause she’s probably worried sick about me. I miss her a lot. Fjord tells me he wants to check in on Caddy too. And I need to have a chat with the Traveller because shit has been _wild_ lately. He’s my god. Well, not technically a god, but functionally one. He gives me my powers, see? But I can’t properly contact him right now because I’m so far from home. He’s super powerful but…but I’m not even in the same universe as him right now, so the connection is weak, I guess.” Jester’s smile turned thin and sad. “I miss him a lot too.”

“But you used to be able to talk to him? Your…uh, god?”

“Yeah! All the time. He sometimes popped out of nowhere to chat with me too. And he taught me this one spell which lets me speak to people super far away so that I wouldn’t be lonely ever; I could always talk to mama no matter where in the world I was.”

“Like a telephone.”

“Yep. Caduceus knows that spell too, because he also learns his magic from a god, see, but he doesn’t use it very much. I think its because he knows I’m way better at composing those messages than him.” She giggled. “So, he just leaves the job to me.”

“But he could in theory send a magic message to you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Jester, frowning at her sketchbook. “Not right now. Because we’re in different worlds the messages don’t make it. I’ve tried talking to my mama and Caduceus, but they never respond. Probably because my connection to the Traveller is so weak right now.”

Beau resisted the urge to shuffle closer to Jester. She had the unfamiliar need to maintain the cheerful air that had begun to wilt as Jester’s sadness became more apparent.

“The connection can’t be too weak if you can still do some magic though, right?”

Jester grinned and wiggled in place, like she would have danced if she weren’t sitting down. “You’re so right! I haven’t had the chance to do much magic yet, but I’m still very cool and super magical. Check this out!”

She snapped the fingers of her hand which was not holding the pencil. Suddenly, the bedroom was full of pink and purple baubles. They glittered and flew about the room like shards of light from a glass window-charm before each popped like bubble-gum and transformed into miniature glowing creatures. Most looked like chubby unicorns, some like hamsters, some like seahorses, some like kittens, some like animals Beau didn’t recognise. All were prancing around above their heads.

“Woah…”

“This is useful when we get into a fight,” explained Jester as she tickled a passing hamster’s stomach. “They attack things that try to kill me, you see.”

Beau was still staring. “Cool. Cute _and_ lethal.”

The creatures remained for another ten minutes while Jester drew, until they faded away in the air. Jester hummed to herself as she drew, occasionally asking Beau random questions about her favourite books and television shows (something Jester had learnt about only recently) and if she was in love with anyone. Luckily, Beau was not half bad at lying.

Finally, Jester turned the book around. The drawing was detailed, flattering, and showed Beau lounging on the bedsheets in a sleeveless shirt which showed off her arms. It was many miles better than what Beau had expected.

Before Beau could voice her delight, both women flinched at the sound of somebody suddenly stomping into the main room of the tower. They heard a muffled curse, then more stomping.

“Is that Fjord?”

Jester shook her head. “Sounds like Caleb.”

They found him pacing the main room, spitting curses in German at the fireplace as he passed it. He wrung his hands, glared at the floor, and didn’t appear to notice Jester and Beau watching him from the hallway.

“He seems upset,” whispered Jester. “Do you think Essek hurt him?”

Beau shook her head. “This is something else.” She was familiar with this kind of frustration. “Hey, Caleb,” she said as she walked over, ignoring Jester’s shock. “Giving up so soon?”

Caleb froze by the coffee table. He quickly pulled his hands behind his back. “Beauregard, Jester, I did not think you would be here. It is the middle of the day. Are y—”

Beau grabbed his right forearm and pulled his hand between them. His hand was loosely bandaged. “How did this happen?”

“It is not important.”

“Is that blood?” Beau pulled his hand closer to her face. “Dude.”

“Blood?” cried Jester. She appeared by Beau’s shoulder and grabbed Caleb’s wrist, wrenching his hand towards her own face. Caleb squirmed in their grips. “Oh, my Gods, Caleb, your hand is all burned up! You should have shown this to me!”

“Um.”

“No, no, don’t say anything,” said Jester as she hauled Caleb towards the sofa and shoved him onto the cushions. “Sit there. I’m going to heal you now. You shouldn’t have hidden that Caleb; the burns could get infected!”

Jester began fussing over his hands, picking at his damp bandages, and swatting away Caleb’s half-hearted attempts to stall her. She easily overpowered him.

“Did Essek do that?” asked Beau.

Caleb sighed. He turned his head away from them, likely wishing he had his hands free to cover his face. “No.”

“Tell me what happened.”

He met her eyes. His expression was dark. “I would rather not, Beauregard.”

“You promised me you would share everything you learned about Essek and everything relevant that happens over there. This seems pretty fucking relevant to me.”

“It is tricky, Beauregard,” hissed Caleb. He subtly jerked his head towards Jester, who was busy tutting over his burns.

Beau tapped her foot, chewed her lip, and considered giving a fuck for once. After a moment she decided against it. “Jester, you can keep secrets, right?”

Jester paused her ministrations to look up at Beau with wide eyes. “Of course,” she said, unconvincingly.

“Hm.” Caleb stared at Beauregard. “Perhaps it does not matter anymore.”

“Tell me what happened,” repeated Beau.

“ _Ja_. _Ja_ , I will do that.” His face remained grim as he let his eyes rest on his blistering hands. Jester was muttering under her breath, clutching a medallion where she knelt by the sofa. The medallion began to glow a soft green colour between her fingers. “He taught me a spell I was not familiar with. I might not have had a chance of stumbling upon it myself without his guidance. He let me learn it and practice it as a thanks for the book on history I brought him.”

“And the cupcake?” added Jester, now cradling his hands in her own. The glow persisted, wrapping around his burns like apple-green gauze. “Did he like the vanilla cupcake too?”

Caleb coughed out a reluctant chuckle. “ _Ja_. He did like the cupcake.”

“Oh, nice!”

“He was…almost eager to see me perform magic in front of him. I was eager to do it too. I attempted the spell, which conjured an arcane flame in my hand, and…and then I burned myself. It is as simple as that.”

“Did he send you away afterwards?” asked Beau.

“No. I left.”

“So, you lost control of the spell.”

“No,” insisted Caleb. “I did not. I was in complete control; I fully understood the mechanics of the spell; I never lost control. The flame—it—the flame—” He bit his lip. Jester kept her head down, quietly holding his hands. “…somewhere along the way I became lost. I fell deep into myself and became smaller than the spell. Smaller than the fire in my hand. I cannot explain it to you.”

Beau didn’t want him to try. His face was pained, his voice clipped, and she had seen him hurt enough explaining his trauma the first time around.

“Sounds scary.”

“It was. I almost let the fire eat the room around me. I would have done it had Essek not stopped me and dispelled the incantation-equation.”

The three of them fell into silence for a moment. Jester knelt by Caleb, cradling his hands within her healing glow, where Beau could not see her face. Caleb stared at his hands within the glow. His face was twisted; somewhere caught between hatred, disgust, confusion, and relief.

Beau crossed her arms and moved to sit across from Caleb. He flinched and followed her with wary eyes.

“Do you think this will happen again?”

Caleb sighed, quiet and tired. “I do not know. I do not want it to happen again. If I can, I will avoid casting that spell. Beyond that…I cannot make promises.”

Beau nodded. “Good. You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I expected anger from you, Beauregard. Criticism. I expected you to shame me.”

“You didn’t know it would happen. It’s not your fault.”

Caleb looked away again. He seemed to fade away a little, despite not moving from where he sat.

“I think you’re okay,” said Jester quietly. Caleb stiffened. “I know that you wanted to keep these burns. You wanted them to fester. You didn’t want us to see them, or for us to know what happened. But I think you’re alright.”

An awful noise came from Caleb. Something like a laugh, something like a groan. “…I am so used to being a piece of shit, of waiting for people to see how I am a piece of shit. This feels like a cruel joke.”

“I am being honest, Caleb. I am not lying to you.”

“Then you haven’t known me for long enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always for the lovely comments and support 💕  
> Fair warning, I may need to take a one-week break in order to catch up on editing the next few chapters. In other news, I now have a pretty clear idea of how the last act of this story will go so I can roughly estimate how long this fic will run chapter-wise. But I'll adjust that number when I'm inevitably wrong again. (sorry about the week hiatus lol)

**Author's Note:**

> Assuming I stick with this fic, it'll be one of the longest fics I've ever written, based on my rough plan. Oops.  
> If you like what you see, please don't hesitate to leave some love and I'll reply to what I can. Thanks for reading!


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